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TechFabric

App development · Houston, TX

App development for Houston companies

Houston is energy and petrochemicals, and the Texas Medical Center, which is the largest medical complex in the world. Two industries with almost nothing in common except that both generate enormous quantities of instrumented data.

Founded

2017, and still independent

Bench

115+ people, 80 Databricks-certified

Experience

Fifteen years average, per engineer

Serving

Houston, Sugar Land, The Woodlands, Pasadena

Energy and medical apps here are instrumented: a field engineer's tablet, a clinician's console, a monitoring app reading from thousands of sensors. We build the app on a pipeline that can replay, so what the screen showed overnight can be reconstructed in the morning.

DatabricksTemporalAzure

TechFabric 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.

Two regulators, one platform

Energy operations answer to one set of rules and clinical research to another, and a company with both runs a platform that has to satisfy each without a fork. Policy evaluated per action rather than per application is what makes that possible.

None of that is unusual for Houston, and none of it is a reason to build slowly. It is a reason to decide where the evidence comes from before the first handler is written, because the alternative is reconstructing it later from logs that were not designed to answer the question.

How an engagement runs

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

Talk to an engineer in Houston

Two weeks, fixed fee, and a written plan whether or not you build it with us.

Headquarters

1530 E Williams Field Rd, Ste 201
Gilbert, AZ 85295

Phone

+1 (480) 681-6806

Also

Amsterdam, Dnipro, Hyderabad

Working hours

Houston business hours, most days

FAQ

App development in Houston: common questions

Do you work with Houston 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 Houston?

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.

We have both energy operations and clinical research. One platform?

Yes, and without a fork. Policy is evaluated per action rather than per application, so two regimes with different rules run on the same runtime with different checkpoints enforced. Maintaining two platforms to satisfy two regulators is the expensive way to solve this.

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.