Android Development Company

3.9 Billion Devices. One Framework That Matters.

Android runs on 72.77% of the world’s mobile devices. Approximately 3.9 billion people use Android daily. Google Play hosts over 2 million apps and is projected to surpass 143 billion annual downloads by 2026.

If your product needs to reach consumers in the US, Europe, Latin America, Asia, or Africa, Android is not optional. It is the default platform.

The question is whether your Android development company builds for the platform Android actually is in 2026 (Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material Design 3 Expressive, adaptive layouts for foldables, Android 16 requirements) or whether they are still shipping Java and XML Views and hoping nobody notices.

EltexSoft is a boutique engineering studio. 35-50 senior engineers. We build native Android apps in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose with the full Jetpack library set. Our clients include Shell, FreeStuffFinder, HeyTutor, and MOTTIV. We’ve been doing this since 2015. Eleven years, through every major Android architecture shift: Java to Kotlin, Views to Compose, and now into Kotlin Multiplatform.

What We Build on Android

Consumer Apps with Serious Traction

Apps that people actually download, use daily, and recommend.

FreeStuffFinder is a deals and coupons app founded by Tina Su in 2011. The brand has helped 43 million shoppers (per FreeStuffFinder’s own reporting), reaches over a million monthly readers, and has 2.2 million social media followers. The Android app has 500,000+ installs on Google Play with a 4.1+ average rating. This is the kind of consumer app where push notification strategy, content delivery speed, and monetization architecture determine whether the business grows or stalls.

Enterprise Mobile for Fortune-Class Companies

Apps where security, offline capability, MDM compatibility, and API reliability are non-negotiable.

We built mobile products for Shell, the global energy major that serves approximately 32 million customers per day at its mobility sites worldwide. Shell’s mobile ecosystem includes fuel payment, loyalty (Fuel Rewards, 25+ million members), EV charging, and fleet management. Enterprise Android development at this scale means certificate pinning, encrypted local storage, background sync, and the kind of release discipline where a bad push costs real money.

EdTech and Marketplace Apps

Two-sided platforms with matching, scheduling, payments, and role-based dashboards.

HeyTutor is a long-running EdTech partnership. It’s a tutoring marketplace connecting students, tutors, parents, and school districts. The Android components handle search, booking, scheduling, messaging, and payments across multiple user roles. Years on a single client means our engineers understand the business domain as deeply as the codebase.

Fitness and Training Apps

Training plan interfaces, content delivery, progress tracking, and health integrations.

MOTTIV (formerly Triathlon Taren) ships an Android client our team has contributed to. Training plans, workout tracking, and content delivery for endurance athletes.

FoodTech Apps

We have shipped multiple food delivery and restaurant Android apps. Order state management, real-time delivery tracking, Google Maps integration, payment processing, and push notifications that arrive at the right moment. In FoodTech, the difference between a working app and a good app is whether the order status updates in real time and whether the driver sees the right drop-off pin.

How We Engineer Android Apps

Kotlin and Jetpack Compose

Kotlin powers 70% of the top 1,000 Play Store apps. Google’s own apps, including Maps, Drive, and 60+ others, are Kotlin-first. Jetpack Compose is used by 60% of the top 1,000 apps including Pinterest, Airbnb, Spotify, ChatGPT, and Google Play itself (Google I/O 2025).

We write new Android code in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose. Java only when maintaining legacy codebases. XML Views only when the widget doesn’t have a Compose equivalent yet (increasingly rare).

Architecture and State Management

MVVM with unidirectional data flow for most apps. MVI for complex screens with many user actions. Clean Architecture with use-case boundaries for larger codebases. Hilt for dependency injection. Kotlin Coroutines and Flow for all async work, with structured concurrency instead of callback chains.

Data and Networking

Room for relational persistence. DataStore for key-value and proto. Retrofit + OkHttp for REST APIs. Ktor for newer Kotlin-first networking. Pagination with Paging 3 for list-heavy screens. Offline-first with Room + WorkManager sync for field and enterprise apps.

Build, CI/CD, and Release Engineering

Every Android project we ship follows the same engineering discipline:

Build system: Gradle with Version Catalogs for dependency management. KSP instead of kapt for annotation processing (faster builds, better error messages). Build variants for debug, staging, and production with environment-specific API endpoints and signing configurations.

Continuous integration: GitHub Actions or Bitrise runs on every pull request. The pipeline runs lint checks (Detekt + ktlint), unit tests (JUnit5 + Turbine for Flow), Compose UI tests, and a staging build. No PR merges without green CI.

Code quality gates: Detekt for static analysis. ktlint for formatting. Compose compiler metrics to catch recomposition regressions. Custom lint rules for project-specific patterns.

Release management: Google Play Console with staged rollouts: 1% → 5% → 20% → 100% over 48-72 hours, monitoring crash rates at each stage. Play App Signing for key security. Internal testing tracks for QA, closed beta for stakeholders, open beta when the product warrants it. Pre-launch reports from Google’s automated device lab before every release.

Monitoring and crash reporting: Firebase Crashlytics with custom keys and breadcrumbs. Firebase Analytics for feature usage. Remote Config for feature flags and A/B tests without app updates. Performance Monitoring for network latency and cold start times.

Testing

We don’t ship untested Android apps.

Unit tests: JUnit5 for business logic. Turbine for testing Kotlin Flow emissions. MockK for mocking. Every ViewModel, Repository, and UseCase has test coverage.

UI tests: Compose Testing for component-level verification. Interaction tests for critical user flows like onboarding, checkout, and booking. Screenshot tests for visual regression detection.

Integration tests: Staging API calls with real network responses. End-to-end flows on physical devices from our device matrix.

Device coverage: We test on Samsung Galaxy (the global market leader), Google Pixel (the reference device), and key regional manufacturers. Minimum three screen densities, minimum two API levels. Foldable testing for apps that target large screens.

Security

Certificate pinning for API communication. Encrypted SharedPreferences or Jetpack Security for sensitive local data. ProGuard/R8 obfuscation and shrinking. Root detection and integrity verification where enterprise requirements demand it. Play Integrity API for app authenticity verification.

Native vs Cross-Platform in 2026

The debate has matured. Here is what we tell clients:

Go native (Kotlin + Compose) when performance, hardware integration, or brand-defining UX matters. Real-time location, camera-heavy features, offline-first enterprise apps, and pixel-perfect consumer experiences all belong here. Airbnb famously moved back from React Native to native in 2018. The reason hasn’t changed: native gives you full access to every platform API, the best performance, and the smallest surface area for framework-introduced bugs.

Go Kotlin Multiplatform when your Android and iOS teams want to share business logic (networking, validation, domain models, analytics) while keeping fully native UIs in Compose and SwiftUI. KMP has been stable since November 2023. Netflix, McDonald’s, Cash App, Philips, and Forbes use it in production. KMP adoption doubled from 7% to 18% among developers in a single year (JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem 2025).

Go Flutter when you need a design-led, branded UI on both platforms with one team and you don’t need deep native API integration.

Go React Native when your team is already React/JavaScript-fluent and the app is feature-led rather than animation-led.

We primarily build native. We recommend cross-platform when the project genuinely calls for it, not because it’s easier to staff.

What It Costs

Senior Android engineer (dedicated): $50-99/hr. A full-time dedicated developer costs $8,000-$16,000/month.

By project type:

MVP with 3-5 core screens: $25K-$80K, 4-6 months.

Mid-market product with payments, API integrations, and multi-role auth: $80K-$250K, 6-9 months.

Enterprise platform with offline-first, compliance controls, and MDM: $250K-$500K+, 9-18 months.

Annual maintenance: budget 15-20% of build cost for OS updates, security patches, and feature work. Android 16 and 17 transitions are real engineering events.

Compare to US agencies at $100-$200/hr or Indian shops at $20-$65/hr. Our $50-99/hr rate puts us in the Eastern European premium tier, comparable to Netguru and Miquido, with named US-market apps that most agencies at our size cannot match.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique Android development company. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

Our Android clients include Shell, FreeStuffFinder, HeyTutor, and MOTTIV. We also build iOS apps, Laravel backends, Django APIs, React frontends, and Vue.js applications.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ Upwork five-star reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years.

We have shipped through three major Android architectural shifts: Java to Kotlin, View system to Jetpack Compose, and now Compose to Kotlin Multiplatform. The team that builds your app in 2026 has the context to maintain it in 2029. That continuity is the difference between an app that compounds in quality and one that gets rewritten every two years.

30-minute technical call. Bring your Play Store app, your architecture questions, or your napkin sketch. We’ll tell you what we’d build and what we wouldn’t.

Talk to us →