Tap-worthy mobile app design for
frictionless journeys

Mobile app design from Studio Ubique covers UX research, user flow mapping, wireframes, high-fidelity UI design, interactive prototypes, and a design system with reusable components. The output is a complete design package that’s ready to hand off to developers, whether that’s your in-house team, a third-party dev shop, or our own developers.

For most projects we work in Figma, with ProtoPie for advanced micro-interactions when those matter. Deliverables include organised design files, style guides, design tokens (spacing, typography, colour), exported assets in the right formats for iOS and Android, plus developer notes on edge cases and animation specifications. Mobile app design sits inside our broader UX and UI design work, with the same approach: research first, then structure, then visuals.

Native (Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android) gives the best performance, deepest platform integration, and access to device features like ARKit, background sync, or Core ML. The downside: two codebases to build and maintain. Hybrid frameworks (React Native, Flutter) let you build one codebase that targets both, with some compromise on platform-specific feel. Progressive web apps run in the browser, install like an app, and skip the App Store and Play Store entirely.

The right choice depends on what the app needs to do. If you rely on heavy device APIs, real-time camera processing, or push notifications that need to behave platform-natively, native usually wins. If feature parity across iOS and Android matters more than perfect platform feel, hybrid is faster and cheaper to maintain. If your app is primarily content or transactional and you’d rather avoid app store gatekeepers, PWA is worth considering. We design for whichever direction makes sense, often with input from your dev team on what their stack supports.

Both. Some clients hand the designs off to their own iOS and Android developers (or to a third-party dev shop they already work with) and we stay involved only for design questions during implementation. Other clients want one team for both, in which case our mobile app development team picks up the build using React Native, Flutter, or native Swift/Kotlin depending on what the project needs.

The decision usually comes down to whether you have a dev team in place that can handle mobile, and how much continuity matters between the design phase and the build phase. One-team setups reduce handoff overhead but cost more upfront. Split setups give you more flexibility on dev sourcing but require clearer documentation in the design files. We work both ways and the choice is yours, not ours.

A complete Figma file with all screens organised by flow, a design system with reusable components and documented states (default, hover where relevant, pressed, disabled, error, loading), design tokens for typography, colour and spacing, exported assets in iOS and Android specifications, and developer notes covering edge cases, animations and platform-specific behaviour. Interactive prototypes live alongside the static files for the key flows.

If your developers prefer specific handoff tools (Zeplin, Avocode, or just Figma’s built-in inspect mode), we configure the files accordingly. For larger projects we also document the design rationale: why a specific pattern was chosen over alternatives, which competitors influenced the direction, what user research findings shaped which decisions. That documentation matters when someone new joins the team six months after launch and needs to understand why the app works the way it does.

iOS and Android have distinct design languages (Human Interface Guidelines on Apple’s side, Material Design on Google’s), and users in each ecosystem have built-in expectations about navigation, gestures, typography and motion. We respect those conventions where it matters (tab bars at the bottom on iOS, navigation drawers and FABs on Android, system fonts on both) and only break with them when the deviation serves a clear product purpose.

For cross-platform builds we usually pick one design language as the baseline (often Material because it adapts more flexibly) and adjust per platform where users will notice the difference. The alternative, building completely separate iOS and Android designs that share only a brand, doubles design hours without doubling value for most apps. We make the platform-by-platform tradeoff explicit in the design phase so it’s a decision rather than an accident.

Our hourly rate is €60-€65 across all roles (UX, UI, design management). Design-only projects typically run €4,000 to €15,000 depending on number of screens, complexity of the design system, and how much user research is needed. A simple app with 10 to 15 screens lands at the lower end. A complex app with 40+ screens, multiple user types, and a comprehensive design system sits at the higher end. Design plus development projects sit considerably higher, typically €15,000 to €50,000 depending on what’s being built.

Timelines for design only run from 4 weeks for a focused app design to 12 weeks for a complex project with research and prototyping rounds. Design plus development runs 3 to 6 months end to end. The biggest scope variables are user research (interviews and testing take real calendar time), number of screens and flows, and how clear the product requirements are at the start. Schedule a discovery call to walk through what you need.

If we’re also building the app, we move directly into development sprints with the same team. If you’re handing off to your own developers, we offer optional post-design support: an hourly retainer where designers stay available to answer implementation questions, adjust designs when edge cases come up, and review built screens before they ship. Most projects use somewhere between 10 and 30 hours of post-design support in the first three months after handoff.

Once the app is live, we can stay involved through ongoing maintenance and support packages: Care (4 hours per month, 24-hour response), Growth (8 hours per month, 8-hour response) or Partnership (16 hours per month, 4-hour response). Pricing starts at €240 per month. For teams shipping continuously, we also run a dedicated-developer or dedicated-designer model on a retainer basis.