Hi, We’re Instamobile.

We are a team of experienced software engineers, who started Instamobile to help developers and entrepreneurs launch their mobile apps more quickly. We have over 10 years of mobile development experience, having worked as software engineers in companies such as Twitter and Instagram (part of Meta), in San Francisco.

Making apps has been our obsession over the last 14 years. We literally worked on hundreds of projects, and wrote code on tens of different programming languages. Our code is being run every day by more than a billion people – if you have a Twitter or Instagram account, you’re running our code every time you open the app! While working on all these projects, under various circumstances, and having spent more than 10 years in Silicon Valley,  we noticed a few key things that made us start Instamobile:

1. Building a mobile app is frickin’ hard

It takes time, money and effort. To do product, design, development and testing. Across iOS, Android and web. With product managers, designers, backend developers, frontend developers and testers. I hope you realize how complex this is. And this is just building an app – you need to build a business as well.

2. 80% of building a mobile app is duplicate work

Developers know this already – each one of us probably built tens of login forms in our life. Think only about Login with Facebook – We probably implemented it at least 10 times from scratch. Hours we’ll never get back. But it’s fun. That’s why developers still reinvent the wheel every time they get a chance.

Freelancers and agencies know this the best though. Freelancers get paid to reinvent the wheel. That shopping app your freelancer built for you and charged you a few thousand grant? Guess what, they charge many other people the same amount, on the same code, with a few design tweaks.

There are a lot of things apps have in common: login & registration, user management, analytics, push notifications, chat, accepting payments, in-app subscriptions, server configurations, etc. Wasting time, money and energy on any of these things is plain stupid.

3. Hiring top 1% talent is impossible

It’s impossible to hire top talent in the design & development worlds, when you are barely getting started. Not only high class developers would be extremely expensive, they are not even available to you. Top developers are either running their own companies, or they are getting fat checks from their comfortable Silicon Valley jobs (trust me, we know).

Even if they would be available for freelancing, chances are you’ll get outbid by some other company that has more capital. So in most cases, you need to settle for lower quality design, code and product. If you ever tried Upwork, you understand exactly what we’re talking about.

4. React Native and Firebase are game changers

React Native and Firebase changed the mobile development game entirely – everyone can now launch a fully fledged mobile app in no time. Even those who are just learning how to code. The combination of these two (React Native & Firebase) has lowered the barrier of entry into the mobile world tremendously. You get to build an app for both iOS and Android, with the same code, while not having to deal with server infrastructure and backend development. If you developed mobile apps 5 years ago, this probably sounds too good to be true.

5. The best way to learn a new programming language is by directly working on a project

It turns out that once you already have some basic computer science skills and know at least one programming language, navigating a completely new codebase, written in an unknown language is actually easy. And you get to have a ton of impact right away. That’s why we encourage all web developers who want to get into mobile development, to start with a premium (or open-source) React Native project. Getting your hands dirty is fun and extremely productive.

Instamobile

That’s how Instamobile came to life. Instamobile’s mission is to provide developers, entrepreneurs and freelancers with premium fully fledged boilerplate apps, to help them launch their new businesses more quickly and at a fraction of the cost and energy. I’m leveraging my experience working at successful mobile app companies, to build app templates that are extremely beautiful, written in high-quality code, and optimized for user growth. If you’ve read this far, you should definitely check out our React Native templates.