Choosing a mobile app company in Nepal: ask this first

Open our developer page on Google Play and you will find ten apps. Eight are ours, including EK ERP, EK Mail, EK SMS, EkTrek and Travel Quoter. The other two belong to clients: KUSOED EMIS, the education management app for Kathmandu University School of Education, and Sublime Teams, a team coordination app for distributed crews, built for Sublime Corporation International. Both list "EK Ra Sunya Inc" as the developer, because they are published under our account.

That is a deliberate choice. It is also the first thing you should ask any mobile app development company in Nepal about, before price and before the framework: whose store account will my app live on, and how do I get it back?

For a buyer, publishing under the agency's account is often the fastest way to get a first version live, and it is fine as long as your contract says the app can be transferred to your own account when you ask. If the agency can't tell you how that transfer works, you are buying a lease, not an app.

Why we usually publish client apps under our account

Getting your own company onto both stores takes paperwork that most first-time app owners don't expect.

Apple requires an organisation to be a legal entity that can sign contracts, to have a D-U-N-S Number from Dun & Bradstreet, to have a working website on its own domain, and to enroll through someone with legal authority to bind the company. The membership is 99 USD a year. None of that is hard, but a business that has never needed a D-U-N-S Number has to apply for one before anything else can happen.

Google Play has its own hurdle. Personal developer accounts created after 13 November 2023 have to run a closed test with at least 12 testers, opted in continuously for 14 days, before they can apply for production access. For a small business whose owner opens a personal account to save time, that is two weeks added to launch, and finding 12 real testers is harder than it sounds.

Our account has been through all of this already. A client app can go from final build to store review without waiting on their paperwork. That is the whole benefit, and for a first version it is usually worth it.

What it costs you

The cost is ownership, and it shows up later.

While the app is in our account, the store lists us as the developer. The reviews, ratings and install history sit in our console. If you ever change agencies, the new team can't push an update until the app is moved, because only the account that owns the listing can release to it.

Both stores do support moving an app. On Google Play, both accounts must be registered and active, you need the registration transaction ID for each, and creating a new account to receive the app costs a US$25 registration fee. Some things stay behind: orders made before the transfer, the bulk reports, promotions and test groups. Links to Firebase, Analytics and Google Cloud have to be reconnected by hand.

On the App Store, the current account holder starts the transfer and the receiving account holder accepts it. The app keeps its reviews and ratings and stays available for download during the move. The new owner only sees sales and payment data from after the transfer.

None of this is a reason to avoid agency-account publishing. It is a reason to agree on the exit before you start.

Our policy is simple: if a client asks to move their app to their own developer account, we transfer it at no charge, once their accounts are registered and active.

Three more questions to ask in the first call

Start with the upload key. With Play App Signing, Google holds the key that signs the app on users' phones, and the developer holds an upload key that proves updates come from the right place. Losing the upload key is recoverable: you create a new one and request a reset in Play Console. Losing access to the account that owns the app is not something a key reset fixes. Ask who will hold the upload key and how it gets handed over.

Then ask about the Firebase and cloud projects. Push notifications, crash reports and analytics usually run through Firebase or a similar service. If those projects live in the agency's Google account, they move separately from the app and have to be relinked after a transfer. Ask for them to be created under your account from day one, with the agency as a member.

Last, ask whose domain the app's API runs on. An app that talks to api.youragency.com breaks the day that domain changes hands. Your app should talk to a domain you own, even if the agency hosts the server behind it.

How we handle it

Our mobile app development work covers publishing to both stores, including signing and release management, and you can see every app currently live under our account on our apps page.

What we recommend to clients: launch v1 under our account if your store paperwork isn't ready, start your D-U-N-S and developer account applications in parallel, and move the app across once your accounts are active. Because the transfer is free, launching under our account first doesn't lock you in.

If you are comparing app companies in Nepal right now, put the ownership question in your first email. The answer tells you more about the agency than its portfolio does. If you want to ask us, start here.