The Roadmap for Connected Hardware
The companion app is the last thing on the hardware roadmap and the first thing customers touch. A fixed-price roadmap that settles the BLE, pairing, and firmware decisions before you hire anyone. $2,500, two weeks.
Your device works. The companion app is the part customers actually hold, and it is usually the last thing on the plan and the first thing that slips. The expensive part is not writing it. It is the handful of connectivity and ownership decisions made in the first week, which quietly set your support load, your review scores, and your firmware release cadence for years.
What this settles
Connectivity architecture
BLE, Wi-Fi, NFC, or a cloud round trip. Which transport carries which job, what happens when the phone is in a pocket and the screen is off, and whether background execution can legally do what your demo assumes.
Pairing and first run
The single highest-refund moment in a hardware product. Permission order, discovery, retry, and the failure states that decide whether a customer sets the device up or puts it back in the box.
Firmware updates over the app
How an update reaches the device, what happens when it is interrupted, and how you avoid the version matrix where app 2.1 bricks a device still on firmware 1.4.
What the app owns
Every feature you put in the app is a feature the device cannot do alone, and every feature you put in firmware is one you cannot fix quickly. Where that line sits is the decision that is most expensive to move later.
Why me on this one
I build connected apps myself, not only advise on them. I ship a Bluetooth LE scanner on the App Store, a vestibular training app that reads head motion off AirPods sensors in real time, and a motion-triggered camera. I have reverse engineered an undocumented industrial building-automation API to get a device talking to a phone when the vendor said it could not be done.
That matters here because most mobile advice for hardware teams comes from people who have only ever built apps that talk to a server. The failure modes are different. State restoration, permission timing, and background delivery are where these projects actually die.
What you get
A written roadmap
The decisions, the sequence, and the reasoning behind each one, in a document you can act on immediately or hand to any team.
A working session
A live walkthrough to pressure-test the tradeoffs with you and your firmware lead, so you own every decision rather than receive it.
Who this is for
Hardware teams with a working device and no companion app yet, or a prototype app that will not survive contact with customers.
It fits best when the founders are technical but not mobile people, and the app is now standing between a finished device and a ship date.
This is not for you if you want someone to write the app this quarter. I settle the decisions. You or your team build from them.
Tell me what the device does, how it talks, and which decision you keep going back and forth on.
Start your roadmap