The quality and eventual success of your mobile software product depends on those who create it. A good software development company must be experienced, reliable, customer- and result-oriented, and so on, and so forth. But where should you look for it? You may start with Googling, but the results will rather show, which companies have great SEO, rather than really great developers. And the natural way to disclose the qualities and competences of a software development company is to gather as much information as possible, to finally make a decision.
Perhaps the most advanced solution will be freelance marketplaces (oDesk, Elance, Guru, PeoplePerHour, Freelancer.com). Here you can not only search for remote contractors (namely software developers), but manage a project and carry out payments. Such marketplaces make the collaboration between contractors and clients as transparent as possible; for example, oDesk offers software Test Automation Services for time tracking, which is a usual thing to check the progress of a current task by a hourly-rate project. You can find a number of software developers from around the world there, read their profiles, learn more details about them, their services, job proposals, check their portfolio and reviews. Gather all the necessary information about the companies to form the whole picture, contact them. Working on a freelance marketplace brings a high degree of confidence in your contractor. The rest is a matter of choice.
Advice/references are reliable sources of information after you have gathered a bulk of opinions. It’s good if you have trusted friends or acquaintances who can advise you on a software development company, the experience of collaboration, etc. Otherwise you may gather opinions from various forums. You may participate in a business forum to search for an advice, then in a developers forum, to check the details about a peculiar company. You may start a discussion or search for the corresponding topics. Very popular are question-and-answer websites (such as Quora or Yahoo! Answers). You simply leave a question there and get numerous answers to compare and analyze.
Another way is social networks. The biggest player here is a business social network LinkedIn – a popular place for starting business relationships. There you may look for a dedicated group and find candidates to carry out your project, check their websites and portfolios. You may filter the contractors according to your preferences (by location, for example, to see if the time zone is convenient for the future communication).
Application stores (Apple App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone Store, BlackBerry World) are also great additional sources of information about the results of developers’ work: here you can see apps’ rating and read the reviews. See the portfolio and search for the apps created by the company. Check the active apps, which are regularly updated and supported. Presence of support depends on the will of the software owner; lack of support does not necessarily mean that the app itself is a bad one.
There are also specialized events, such as various mobile conferences, held at different levels and dedicated to different topics. There you can learn more about software companies, and contact representatives for a personal conversation. That’s a great way of establishing long-term business relationships, having met your potential developer face to face.
