App development · Chicago, IL
App development for Chicago companies
You've got a launch date and an MVP that falls over once real users and orders hit it. One senior team designs and builds the app and its backend, so the version you launch is the one that scales. Chicago apps often meet freight and finance at once, a dispatch tool for a carrier out of the Elwood intermodal yards or a trading screen in the Loop, and a restaurant group needs the same care.
Founded
2017, and still independent
Bench
115+ engineers, 80 Databricks-certified
Experience
Fifteen years average, per engineer
Serving
Chicago, Naperville, Evanston, Schaumburg
Derivatives and futures trading on LaSalle Street and Wacker Drive, heavy manufacturing across the south suburbs and northwest Indiana, and the rail and intermodal yards around Joliet that connect both to everywhere else. If your company sits where regulated finance meets physical logistics, and in Chicago many do, every automated action has a clock and a counterparty.
AzureTechFabric is a Databricks partner with an award-winning Databricks engineering team, 80 of them Databricks-certified, and a Temporal partner. Where a system reaches past the workspace we build on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
What app development covers
iOS and Android
A shared codebase where it suits the product and native where it does not. It is a per-product decision rather than a house position, and anyone who answers it before hearing what the app does is telling you about themselves.
Web apps
The browser half of the same product, built to be changed safely years after the original team has moved on. Tests that mean something, seams where the business logic can move, a deployment nobody is afraid of.
The backend and API
Built with the app rather than found afterwards. Where you already have an API we will work with it and say plainly if it is the reason the app will feel slow.
Offline behaviour and sync
Decided deliberately at the start. A field app that has to work in a warehouse with no signal is a different design from one that assumes a connection, and retrofitting the difference means rewriting the data layer.
Release and store submission
Staged rollout so a bad build reaches a few hundred people rather than everyone, and the App Store and Play Store process including the rejections, which arrive for reasons that have nothing to do with code quality.
Keeping it alive
Two OS releases a year, certificates that expire while somebody is on holiday, and store policies that change. We stay on a maintenance footing or hand over with the provisioning and the release process written down.
Every trade has to reconcile
In Chicago, CME Group runs its futures exchanges from Wacker Drive, Cboe sits a few blocks away on Van Buren, and the trading firms around the old Board of Trade building on LaSalle reconcile every day. CFTC Rule 1.31 keeps their records for five years, and SEC Rule 17a-4 holds broker-dealers to the same discipline, so a position that can't be rebuilt from its history is a finding.
A table of current positions with an audit table beside it is the common design, and month-end goes on explaining why the two disagree. We make the event log the record instead. Every position and report derives from it, and a wrong projection is rebuilt by replay rather than patched by hand. On a desk that reconciles daily, that's an hour against a week.
Design starts from the events themselves. We name every one a trade or an order can emit, agree which system may write each, and replay a week of production history against the new model before anything is cut over. Freight and manufacturing firms get the same treatment, with a shipment or a work order where the trade was.
Clients we have done this for
If your orders, customers and invoices live in separate systems that have to agree, this is the study to read. AmTab's orders reach Business Central from the store without anyone re-keying them, and Power Automate keeps the store, the CRM and the ERP holding the same records.
B2B ecommerce
AmTab
AmTab, a table manufacturer, had orders moving between departments on paper while demand climbed. Senior engineers from TechFabric worked through those manual steps with AmTab's own people first, then connected the amtab.com store, the CRM and Business Central, so an order placed online reaches the ERP that invoices it without anyone retyping it.
How an engagement runs
01
A technical conversation
Not a sales call. An engineer, asking what the app has to do, who uses it, what it talks to and what has been tried. Product and design people join the same conversation where the work needs them.
02
Two weeks, fixed fee
A short assessment ending in a written plan with a scope, a sequence and a number, including the decisions that are cheap now and expensive later. You own the document whether or not you carry on with us.
03
Build with your team in the repo
App, backend and release process together, senior throughout. The person in your standup is the person writing the code.
04
Ship, and keep shipping
Staged rollout, store submission, and either a maintenance footing with us or a handover with the provisioning and release process written down. The handover version only works if it was planned before launch.
Two weeks, fixed fee, and a written plan whether or not you build it with us.
Tell an engineer what you want to build
A senior engineer reads it and replies within one business day, usually with the questions that decide the first two weeks.
Around Chicago
Mobile developers in Chicago
React Chicago holds occasional evening talks at the Merchandise Mart on React and React Native, and GDG Chicago covers the Android and Flutter side with build labs and the odd Kotlin night. DePaul's Jarvis College runs a master's in Human-Computer Interaction from its Loop campus on Jackson Boulevard, teaching user research, prototyping and usability testing.
DePaul's programme is a useful reminder that screens get tested with real users before anyone calls them finished. For a dispatcher at a freight broker or a clerk at a trading firm who has the app open all shift, a confusing screen costs more than a slow one, so usability testing belongs in the plan before the first sprint starts.
The Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro area. Illinois: Cook, DeKalb, DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will counties. Indiana: Jasper, Lake, Newton and Porter counties.
Lighter shape: the city itself. Dot: downtown. County boundaries from the US Census Bureau, 2023.
Meetup · Occasional weekday evenings
React Chicago
React Native talks at the Merchandise Mart cover the cross-platform route, worth hearing before deciding whether a dispatch app needs two native codebases.
Volunteer organisers. Merchandise Mart, 222 W Merchandise Mart Plaza, River North.
University · Ongoing degree programme
Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction, DePaul University
DePaul teaches usability testing on its Loop campus, and a dispatcher who has your app open all shift is exactly who that testing protects.
DePaul University Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media. DePaul University Loop Campus, 1 E Jackson Blvd.
User group · Several times a month
GDG Chicago
Kotlin nights and Android build labs make GDG Chicago the place to learn what a native Android app costs to keep current.
Google Developer Groups volunteers. Venues vary, often around Fulton Market.
Meetup · Monthly, Tuesday evenings
Digital Delivery Chicago (formerly Chicago JavaScript)
Monthly evenings bringing UX designers, QA and developers together show how other teams divide design, testing and release when they ship an app.
Volunteer organisers. Aon Center, 200 E Randolph St, the Loop.
Where you'll find us
- Databricks Data + AI World Tour, Chicago. 29 October 2026. We're sponsoring it, and our team will be there.
Each listing was checked on its organiser's own page on 12 October 2026. Dates and venues move, so the link is the source.
FAQ
App development in Chicago: common questions
Do you work with Chicago companies?
Yes, and with companies across the United States. Arizona does not observe daylight saving, so we are one hour behind you from November to March and two hours behind from March to November. A morning standup on your clock is still early afternoon on ours.
Do you have an office in Chicago?
The office is in Gilbert, Arizona, with teams in Amsterdam, Dnipro and Hyderabad. Delivery is remote or hybrid, and we travel for discovery, workshops and the opening weeks of a build.
Can the event log serve as our reconciliation source?
That is what it is for. The event log is authoritative and read models derive from it, so a projection can be rebuilt by replay rather than reconciled by hand. In a business where reconciliation is a daily function that is the difference between an hour and a week.
Native or cross-platform?
Cross-platform for most business applications, native where the product depends on something the platform does specifically. It is a per-product decision, and we will say which we think applies once we have heard what the app does.
Do you handle App Store and Play Store submission?
Yes, including the rejections. First submissions get rejected for reasons that have nothing to do with code quality, and knowing which ones are coming is most of what makes a launch date real.
Also in Chicago
What else we build for Chicago companies.
AI consulting and development in Chicago
Your engineers built an agent that demos well, but nobody trusts it with a live order, because a restart loses its place and a retry can send the trade twice.
Software development in Chicago
Your integration project has stalled because nobody on the team has time to make five systems agree on one order.
Databricks consulting in Chicago
Month-end reconciliation that runs against a copy of the data instead of the source is the warehouse problem most finance teams share.
App development elsewhere
The same work, in other metros. The full list is here.