Mobile apps
iOS and Android from one codebase, built with React Native and Expo. We handle signing, store submission and review, not just the code.
We build things worth using.
ZL Studio designs, builds and ships mobile apps and SaaS products. Some are ours. Some are yours.
Three things, done properly.
Most products need some of each. We would rather build the whole thing than hand you a design nobody can build.
SaaS platforms
Web products with real backends. Accounts, permissions, data, payments, and the admin tools you need to run the thing after launch.
Pictured: PlayWeya, our browser card room on Cloudflare Workers.
Product design
Wireframe to interface to shipped. Designed on a phone first, because that is where it will be used.
The states nobody demos, designed rather than defaulted
We build for ourselves too.
Two of them, run by us. The decisions in them were made with our own money and our own users.
Find people who are up for it.
Activity-based social discovery. You browse things to do, not people to meet.
A product by ZL Studio
Deal your friends in, wherever they are.
Real-time card games in the browser. One person sets up a table, everyone else joins with a five-character code and plays from their own phone.
A product by ZL Studio
Four steps, and you see all of them.
Scope
Make the first version smaller.
We work out what the product has to do before anyone writes code. Usually that means cutting the first version down.
Design
Test decisions while they are cheap.
Screens and flows on a real device, early, while changing your mind still costs an afternoon.
Build
Use the product from week one.
Software you can open from the first week. No long silences and no big reveal at the end.
Ship and run
Stores, infrastructure and releases.
Store submission, review, staged rollouts, and the unglamorous parts that come after launch.
What that actually means.
You work with the people building it
No account-manager telephone game. The people talking to you about the product are the ones designing and engineering it.
We ship, not just build
Signing, provisioning, store review, staged rollouts and update channels. The last ten percent is where most projects stall, and it is the part we have already done.
Safety is architecture
In GoWeya, a user's exact location cannot reach someone who has not been accepted, because the two are separate types the compiler will not let you confuse. Rules you can forget are not rules.
Built for the phone people own
We budget for a mid-range Android on a slow connection, not a new iPhone on wifi. That is the median user, and it is where the gap shows.
Have something you want built?
Tell us what it is and roughly where it is up to. We will tell you what it would take.