MVP Development for Mobile App Publisher
- API Development Mobile & App Marketing Mobile App Development
- $50,000 to $199,999
- Sep. - Dec. 2022
- Quality
- 0.5
- Schedule
- 0.5
- Cost
- 0.5
- Willing to Refer
- 0.5
"The problems we experienced were not isolated mistakes or the unavoidable friction of software development."
- Consumer products & services
- Annapolis, Maryland
- 1-10 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
Naked Development was hired by a mobile app publisher to develop an MVP for iOS and Android. The team was also tasked with integrating third-party tools, providing 24/7 server monitoring, and running testing.
Naked Development failed to deliver a launch-ready MVP, and the client ended up paying a second company to fix the issues. The team missed every deadline, ignored tickets for critical bugs, and assigned only part-time developers to the project. When confronted, they responded with legal threats.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and position.
I am the Founder and CTO of Kobumura LLC
Describe what your company does in a single sentence.
We are a publisher of mobile applications and developer of mobile application analytics and support services.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What specific goals or objectives did you hire Naked Development to accomplish?
- Develop an MVP of a text proxy app.
SOLUTION
How did you find Naked Development?
- Online Search
- Clutch Site
Why did you select Naked Development over others?
- High ratings
- Great culture fit
- Company values aligned
How many teammates from Naked Development were assigned to this project?
2-5 Employees
Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.
Naked Development was contracted to deliver a fully functional iOS and Android MVP for the LittleTalks app, with third-party integrations (RevenueCat, Twilio, OneSignal, AWS, Heroku, BugSnag), 24/7 server monitoring, QA/regression testing, and a formal 30-day alpha/user acceptance testing period before release.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
None were achieved by Naked Development. The contracted deliverable was a launch-ready iOS and Android MVP plus a full marketing funnel including a product video. We paid $117,000 across two contracts ($68,000 development, $49,000 marketing). The app was never brought to a distributable state because it was too buggy for release. When we brought the codebase to a second development company nearly a year after signing, the app would not build on either iOS or Android. We had to spend thousands of dollars just to get it running enough to assess what needed to be fixed, before remediation could even begin. By the time the app finally launched, approximately one year late, the commercial video Naked produced was also completely unusable, as it contained cultural references that had gone stale during the delay. We received no usable marketing assets and no functional product. $117,000 paid. Both deliverables failed.
Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?
We originally requested delivery by Black Friday, the most critical sales window of the year for a consumer app geared toward parents. Naked Development told us they could not meet that date but committed to December as an alternative - the date was their own suggestion. That too was missed. Rather than immediately escalating, we worked collaboratively with Naked Development through a series of extensions: first to January, then February, then April, and finally to a hard final deadline the following June. That too was missed. We were over 300% over the original timeline before we gave up entirely.
Critical bugs were reported and tickets were put on hold without explanation. We had to repeatedly chase the team just to get status updates. Subscription management, the single most important feature of a subscription app, was broken for months. When we raised it, we were told it would work once in production. It did not. We eventually stopped testing entirely because we should not have been doing their QA work for them.
The contracted development team was never staffed as agreed. We were consistently assigned part-time developers instead of the dedicated team specified in our $68,000 contract. Code repository activity and their own project management software confirmed the full team was never assembled.
Several months after the original deadline we held a meeting with the Naked Development team to formally raise breach, followed by a formal written Notice of Breach itemizing five specific failures: inadequate provisioning of development, testing, and documentation resources; no full feature testing or regression testing after codebase changes; persistent defects not meeting minimum modern engineering standards; consistent introduction of new defects with each release; and the contracted team of at least three developers and a QA Manager never being fully assembled. We gave them one final opportunity to deliver a consumer-ready product by the following June.
John Driscoll's response to that detailed five-point formal breach notice was a three-sentence email saying they had a build they were testing and would get our confirmation when ready. The deadline came and went without a deliverable.
When we raised these concerns directly with Driscoll shortly after that final missed deadline, his response was to use legal intimidation to shut down the conversation. He told us the documented deadlines would never hold up in court, preemptively dismissed our right to a refund by saying "if you win, well," and when we raised the issue of breach, his response was "let's just let our lawyers talk about it." Rather than taking accountability, he minimized every concern, questioned our understanding of software development, and told us "your product's shitty until it's not" as justification for the failure to deliver. It was the opposite of a productive client relationship.
What was your primary form of communication with Naked Development?
Virtual Meeting
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
The initial UI/UX design was good. That is the only positive thing we can say. It was also the only thing they delivered. Everything after that was missed deadlines, broken promises, broken features, legal intimidation, and $117,000 lost. A Figma file is not a product.
Are there any areas for improvement or something Naked Development could have done differently?
The problems we experienced were not isolated mistakes or the unavoidable friction of software development. They reflected a fundamental pattern of overselling and underdelivering, propped up by polished proposals and aggressive legal posturing when clients pushed back. Naked Development should not take contracts they cannot fulfill, should not assemble proposals around teams and processes they have no intention of staffing, and should not respond to legitimate breach concerns by telling paying clients to lawyer up. The single most meaningful improvement they could make would be to only sell what they can actually deliver.
It is also worth noting that we are not unsophisticated clients. We have spent careers in software engineering and have led teams of over 100 engineers. We are intimately familiar with modern, responsible engineering practices. We understood precisely what we were looking at when we evaluated the codebase. The issues we identified were not matters of opinion or unrealistic expectations. They were basic, objective engineering failures. Driscoll's repeated attempts to dismiss our concerns as naivety about how software development works were not only condescending, they were wrong.
RATINGS
-
Quality
0.5Service & Deliverables
"App never reached distribution. Codebase wouldn't build on iOS or Android when handed to a second firm. $117,000 paid for an unusable product."
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Schedule
0.5On time / deadlines
"Missed December deadline. Extended to Jan, Feb, Apr, then June of the following year. Every deadline missed. Over 300% over timeline."
-
Cost
0.5Value / within estimates
"$117,000 paid. App required a second company to remediate before it could launch. Marketing video was unusable. Zero value delivered."
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Willing to Refer
0.5NPS
"We would discourage any company from engaging Naked Development under any circumstances. It is worth noting that neither we nor other clients we are aware of who had similar experiences were ever invited by Naked Development to leave a Clutch review, despite this being standard practice. We can only speculate about which clients were selectively invited to do so.