We spend most of our time working with startups on Android projects—sometimes building from scratch, very often fixing something that already went wrong.
Different products, different industries…
Same 3 mistakes over and over:
- No real product strategy - "let's just start coding"
- Low-budget developers with fragile architecture
- Ignoring performance (ANRs / crashes / jank)
Here's how each one quietly kills a budget, and what I wish more teams did instead.
1. "Let's just start coding" (no product strategy)
On paper, it looks fast:
"We'll figure out the details as we build."
In reality, it turns into:
- Random features and screens
- 3–4 complete rewrites of flows
- Arguments between business and dev
- Acodebase that feels "old" before v1 even ships
What's missing is a basic product + tech strategy:
- Who is the app for?
- What's the one core outcome it must deliver?
- What does Day-0 → Day-7 look like for a new user?
- What is not in v1 and can wait for v2/v3?
- What constraints matter (offline, platform, performance, security)?
Without that, every new idea is seen as "just one more feature", and you burn months on work that never should have been in the first release.
What to do instead?
Before a single screen is designed:
- Map user journeys, not just pages
- Define one clear activation path (how a cold user becomes an active user)
- Write down the smallest possible v1 that still proves the idea
- Align this with a high-level architecture plan (modules, API surface, data model) Ten hours of thinking here can easily save **tens of thousands **later.
2. "Low-budget developers" (Low Cost = High Damage)
We are not against cost-effective teams. We are against incorrect decisions that create massive future costs.
The pattern:
- Quote hunting → pick the lowest number
- The team uses an outdated stack and no architecture
- No automated tests, minimal documentation
- Performance is not considered until production
- After a few months, adding features is painful
On paper, the project was "cheap."
In practice, the second build (the rewrite) is where the real money goes.
What to check before hiring
- Do they build in Kotlin, using Jetpack libraries, Compose (where appropriate), DI, etc.?
- Can they explain their architecture in simple language? (layers, modules, boundaries)
- What's their plan for testing (unit, integration, some UI)?
- How do they handle API versioning so old app versions don't break?
- How do they monitor ANRs and crashes after launch?
If a team can't answer these without hand-waving, the hourly rate doesn't matter—it's going to be expensive.
3. Ignoring performance (ANRs / crashes / jank)
This one hurts the most because it doesn't show up until late.
Founders think:
"We'll optimize later. Let's just get something working."
But on Android, bad performance isn't just an annoyance—it directly hits:
- Play Store Ranking (Android Vitals cares about ANRs & crashes)
- Reviews and Retention
- Acquisition Cost (it's harder to grow a poorly rated app)
Typical symptoms I see:
- Main-thread network or DB calls
- Heavy use of lifecycle callbacks and BroadcastReceivers
- Ad SDKs blocking the UI thread
- No monitoring beyond "it seems fine on my device"
What to do instead
- Set performance budget: startup time, and frame time, ANR/crash thresholds.
- Treat ANRs/crashes as product issues, not "purely technical."
- Use the tools: Android Vitals, Crashlytics, logging, and profiler.
- Move heavy work off the main thread (coroutines, WorkManager, proper threading).
A slightly slower feature roadmap is cheaper than a fast launch that destroys your Play Store metrics.
Bonus: 7 More Mistakes We See All The Time
Quick list without the full rant:
- Overbuilt MVPs (trying to ship the 3+ year vision in v1)
- No dedicated backend roadmap (APIs bolted on as an afterthought)
- Weak auth & security practices
- Ignoring offline/poor-network scenarios
- No analytics → no idea what users do after launch
- Treating QA as a final step, not a continuous process
- No plan or budget for post-launch maintenance
We break all ten down in much more detail (with examples) in a longer guide here:
[https://budventure.technology/blog/top-10-mistakes-startups-make-when-developing-their-android-app]
If you're planning an Android app in 2025
A few questions worth asking yourself before you commit money:
- Do we have a clear v1 scope and activation path?
- Do we know what "good enough" performance looks like?
- Are we optimizing for cheap or for something we can live with for 2–3 years?
If you're currently scoping an Android build and want a second pair of eyes on the plan, I'm always happy to give blunt feedback.
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