The companies we work with often have their own existing IT systems. We pride ourselves on being able to integrate with any type of existing system as long as it exposes APIs that we can work with. We're experts at analysing systems and defining how to put them to best use.

Defining requirements

We have years of experience defining great system interfaces, especially those interacting with native apps. We work with our clients' IT teams to define requirements for exposing services to the apps we're building in a way that will ensure fast communication and take backwards compatibility into account from day one, so the systems can run for years into the future.

BFF, Middleware, Two-speed architecture

A very common approach we apply is known by many names; some call it two-speed architecture, others middleware, we typically call it BFF (Backend For Frontend). This philosophy enables us to extend the capabilities of any underlying system and provide great speed of development. If you have a slow underlying system or your IT resources are limited, a BFF can bridge the need for being flexible and building specifically for mobile with the steadiness of your own systems. That way, you don't need to dedicate your own resources to cater to the app. Leave that safely up to us.

We have used this approach with many of our biggest and most successful clients.

A BFF can be built with many different technologies. We recommend building with established technologies such as AWS for infrastructure and Kotlin or C# as the programming language. We master many different technologies, and we'll base our choices on the specific use case.

The purpose of a BFF is to take data from one or more underlying systems, combine and process the data, and expose it in frontend friendly APIs – be it a REST API or GraphQL. The BFF can also host additional data if needed.

Basically this means that anything your backend system cannot do, the BFF can do instead. The BFF APIs are built specifically for frontends which ensures maximum performance of your app, and because the BFF is built separately from the underlying systems we can typically deploy new features and updates much faster than you would otherwise be able to and without needing to update the mobile apps.

The BFF is literally the BF of your BE.

BFF Highlights

• Build app features without requiring your IT department

• Speed up release cycles

• Maximise app performance

• Extend any legacy system with cool new capabilities

• Avoid updating mobile apps by moving business logic out of them
  
  

Building from scratch

If you're starting from scratch, we can build a backend infrastructure that matches your needs exactly. Our engineers are used to working with the entire stack from setting up servers and databases to hooking up load balancers and caches, building advanced business logic, and exposing APIs.

We build for the present and plan for the future. The systems we build hit the right level of complexity and cost, and are prepared to scale when needed.

Cloud

Everything we do is hosted in the cloud with time proven tools. This gives you maximum flexibility, stability, and security. We're big fans of AWS and Azure, but can work with any system.