Hiring a mobile app developer starts with a decision: one cross-platform codebase or two native apps. That choice determines who you recruit and what you test. Ask for installable builds rather than repositories, screen on release and store experience, interview around offline behaviour and app size, then close before their current release cycle ends.
Start with the stores themselves. Search the App Store and Google Play for apps in your category, then find the small studios and independent developers behind them. Agency alumni are a strong pool, because agency work means many launches, many store submissions and many client constraints. React Native and Flutter both have active communities on Discord, GitHub and regional meetups, and those communities are where cross-platform specialists actually talk. Freelance marketplaces are worth a look for contract-to-hire, since mobile work is often project-shaped. Ask every candidate for public store links before a call, since a shipped app is stronger evidence than a repository. Reaching passive developers is easier with [candidate sourcing software](/candidate-sourcing-software) that keeps outreach organised across several communities at once.
State the framework decision or admit it is open. A developer choosing between roles wants to know whether they will work in React Native, Flutter, or two native codebases, and whether an existing app is being maintained or a new one is being built from scratch. Greenfield and rescue projects attract very different people. Say who owns the store accounts, because inheriting a client's abandoned Apple Developer account is a real and unpleasant task. Mention release cadence, whether there is a backend team or they will integrate with a partner API, and what the app does offline. Design-heavy consumer apps and internal enterprise tools need different instincts. Ground the requirements in our [mobile app developer job description](/job-descriptions/mobile-app-developer) rather than pasting a web developer post.
Install their work. Ask for two or three published apps, download them on a mid-range Android device and an older iPhone, and use them for ten minutes each. Cold start time, layout on a small screen, behaviour with the network switched off and how the app recovers from being backgrounded tell you more than any resume line. Then ask which parts they personally built, because store listings often credit whole teams. Skip take-home projects that require standing up a full app; they take days and good candidates decline. A short code review of a screen with a memory leak or an unnecessary re-render is faster and closer to real work. Their store history also reveals release discipline, including how often they ship and how they handle regressions.
Cover four areas: architecture, platform behaviour, release process and product judgement. In architecture, ask how they separate business logic from UI in a cross-platform codebase and how they share code without ending up with platform-specific hacks in every file. For platform behaviour, discuss push notifications, deep links, permissions prompts, background execution and what happens when a user has no signal in a tunnel. For release, ask what their last rollback looked like and how they staged it. Product judgement shows up in a question about app size or a permission they refused to request. Our [mobile app developer interview questions](/interview-questions/mobile-app-developer) cover the framework-agnostic parts so you can add stack-specific rounds on top.
Cross-platform developers are in steady demand from startups and agencies alike, so assume competition and a shorter decision window than for web roles. Contract-to-hire is common in this market and can be a sensible first step for a single app build. Developers close on ownership of the whole app, a design partner who understands mobile constraints, real devices to test on, and being trusted to say no to features that would bloat the binary. Ask about their current release cycle, because many will not move mid-launch and will accept an offer right after shipping. Compressing your own stages helps: teams that measure and [reduce time to fill](/reduce-time-to-fill) lose fewer finalists to faster-moving competitors.
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