How to Hire an App Developer

Nowadays, we can see the incredible popularity of application development. Millions of applications in various fields help people with their daily affairs and their professional activities. And of course, all apps require talented developers. So in this article, we’ll tell you how to hire app engineers correctly.

Who is an app developer

App developers create, test, and program applications for computers, mobile phones, and tablets. There are plenty of programming languages ​​for development, and all of them are used for multiple platforms, operating systems, and purposes. These languages are usually grouped in such a way:

• - Desktop and laptops: Java, C#, C / C++, Objective-C, Swift, Ruby, Python

• - Mobile and tablets: 

1. Native: Java, C#, C / C++, Objective-C, Swift, Kotlin

2. Web: HTML5 and JavaScript

3. Hybrid: React Native, Ionic, Xamarin, Flutter

As you can see, there are a lot of programming languages, and each one can vary by OS. Therefore, it is worth choosing developers who create an application for a specific operating system.

Mostly, a team of engineers is hired to develop cross-platform applications. It is more expensive but allows you to get high-quality applications for each system much more quickly.  Thus, in a team of four developers, the first develops for Apple devices, the second for Android, the third for Windows, and the fourth develops a fast application for macOS.  But you can also hire full-stack engineers who can create applications for several different operating systems. It is cheaper, but it will take more time and the quality of application can be worse. Obviously, the developer who specializes in creating apps only for iOS knows more about creating apps for Apple devices than the one who creates apps for both Android and iOS.

What should you do before hiring an app developer

First of all, you need to understand what tasks the future employee must perform, what time frame, and the goals of the project. Without this knowledge, it is impossible to plan the budget rationally, choose a developer, and make a list of questions for the programmer.

Secondly, plan your resources. When budgeting, it is very important to analyze the resources needed to create a product. Therefore, we have compiled a table for you with time estimates, which depend on the type of application. According to these estimates, you can calculate your budget to create a product and understand what level of a programmer (junior, middle, senior) you can afford.

Table with time estimates for application development

Source: glassdoor.co.in

App developer job descriptions

The next step while choosing a candidate is viewing a resume.  

Here is an example of a perfect job description: “We need to develop high-quality mobile applications for mobile devices based on Android and iOS. Its functionality should be able to store purchase data in a database, use a camera to read barcodes, be responsive, and have good protection.”

Android developer Responsibilities:

• - Building advanced applications for the Android platform

• - Developing rich, highly performant native UI with great user experience

• - Researching and sharing industry innovations and trends

Skills and Qualifications:

• - 4+ years of development experience

• - Built more than four applications available in Google Play

• - Strong knowledge: Java and Kotlin

• - Strong knowledge of React Native framework

• - Strong knowledge of debugging process

• - Experience in writing reusable unit test documents

• - Strong organizational and communication skills

• - Exceptional knowledge of Database technologies – RDBMS or NoSQL

• - Understanding of Git, Mercurial, or SVN

• - Familiarity with Photoshop and Adobe Creative Cloud

• - English level: spoken

iOS Developer Responsibilities:

• - Working confidently with certificates and profiles of an Apple developer account

• - Ability to create rich, highly performant native UI with great user experience

• - Researching and sharing industry innovations and trends

Skills and Qualifications:

• - 4+ years of development experience

• - Built more than four applications available in the App Store

• - Strong knowledge: Swift

• - Experience with iOS SDK

• - Strong knowledge: ReactiveCocoa and KVO

• - Strong knowledge of React Native framework

• - Strong knowledge of debugging process

• - Experience in writing reusable unit test documents

• - Strong organizational and communication skills

• - Exceptional knowledge of Database technologies – RDBMS or NoSQL

• - Good knowlenge of code versioning tools: Git, Mercurial, or SVN

• - Familiarity with Photoshop and Adobe Creative Cloud

• - English level: Spoken

Q&A to Hire an App Developer

Here we are at the finish line, where you have to choose the best developer. To choose the most suitable talent, you have to ask the right combination of questions during the job interview. We picked the best one below as well as the tasks that you can use while communicating with candidates.

Question 1. Which of the applications that you have created are you most proud of? What was your role in the development team?

What the answer tells you: This question helps you to understand which tasks a developer likes, the applications they have already worked with, and his or her ambitions. what motivates the candidate to move on. It also allows you to see what applications the candidate has already worked with, as well as to see his or her ambitions. Moreover, the answer shows how he or she behaves in a team and whether they are ready to take responsibility for making important decisions.

Question 2. Describe how you will design a specific application.

What the answer tells you: Here, you need to tell a little about the project and give a simple task so that the candidate can schematically depict or outline how he or she is going to develop a specific program. For this task, the candidate can come up with one or two screens and draw them on paper so that you can understand the thought process.

Question 3. What are the best ways to improve the UX without changing the interface?

Answer: The answer to this question is animation. It has been used for a long time and expands the capabilities of the user to simulate the appearance of interaction with a real object. The more powerful and energy-efficient the devices become, the more complex and rich animations the designers and programmers create.

Question 4. What are SQLite limits?

Answer: Database performance depends on a lot of things, including how the database is structured, the complexity of queries, which indexes are defined or not, and the sheer amount of data in them. The performance obtained from one ideal DBMS structure cannot be compared with the performance of another DBMS because the data sets are not identical. It’s worth striving for this ideal, though without “out of the box” thinking, it’s impossible to achieve insane performance.

Question 5. How important are push notifications? And how do you design them correctly?

Answer: Annoying notifications are the main reason people uninstall mobile apps. But the push notification function is a powerful tool that allows you to communicate with users and deliver the right messages in the right place at the right time to increase interaction with the application. 

It's important to note that these messages should be clear and understandable. Regardless of the content of the notification, you must address it to the user and consider the interests of this person. Notification time is the second most important thing. Notifications should be sent at the time that will be most effective for your users. Based on user research, mobile usage peaks between 18:00 and 22:00. But you can use your analytics to choose the best time to send push notifications.

Question 6. Describe the process of creating custom views.

What the answer tells you: Since this is a rather complicated topic, in the answer the candidate might tell only a few basic and necessary steps. However, the developer should make it clear that you always need to create a subclass of View that closely resembles the user component that you want to create - very rarely the View class extends. 

Question 7. How many APIs exist for battery-efficient location tracking? 

Answer: There are three kinds of APIs:

• - Significant location changes — the location is delivered approximately every 500 meters (usually up to 1.5 km) 

• - Region monitoring — track enter/exit events from circular regions with a radius equal to 150m or more. 

• - Visit events — monitor place Visit events that are entered/exited from a place (home/office)

Question 8. What are the types of software testing?

Answer: The basic types of software testing are:

• - Unit testing,

• - Integration testing and regression testing,

• - Shakeout testing,

• - Smoke testing,

• - Functional testing,

• - Performance testing,

• - White box and Black box testing,

• - Alpha and Beta testing,

• - Load testing and stress testing.

Question 9. Tell us how you solve security issues. 

Answer: Security is a very important aspect when developing an application and should be considered properly. The developer must understand what threatens the loss of user data. A lot of time needs to be devoted to issues such as how personal information will be stored, how payments will be processed, what will happen in the event of a security violation, how local and national laws will be followed, and what levels of compliance will be required. Security is a delicate topic, especially when it comes to developing an application. The developer must demonstrate his or her knowledge of security and share their ideas on how to minimize security-related problems.

Question 10. What are some of the areas where SQLite works well? 

Answer: SQLite works well with:

• - Embedded devices and the internet of things,

• - File format applications,

• - Data analysis websites,

• - Cache for enterprise data,

• - Server-side databases, 

• - File archives, 

• - Internal or temporary databases, 

• - Replacement for ad hoc disk files, 

• - Experimental SQL language extensions.

Sum Up

Applications are  a powerful tool that increases sales and attracts customers. Indeed, there are many difficulties in hiring app developers, but bearing in mind everything that we have mentioned above, you should have an easier time finding the right fit.