Insights and News covering Mobile App Development | Glance

When Saying No to Investors Is the Smartest Move

Simon Lee — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

What would you do if an investor offered you £500,000 for 40% of your app business, but the terms included veto rights over hiring decisions and forced you to hit aggressive growth targets that would mean compromising your product quality? Over the past ten years of building apps at Glance, I've watched plenty of founders jump at investment offers that looked brilliant on paper, only to find themselves locked into agreements that made their business almost impossible to run the way they'd originally envisioned. The pressure to secure funding can make any offer feel like a lifeline, but turning down investment money is often the smarter decision for long-term success and happiness as a founder.

Why Your Best Feature Idea Might Be Your Worst Business Decision

Simon Lee — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A dating app company spent six months building a video chat feature after users kept requesting it in feedback surveys. They launched it to great fanfare, complete with a PR campaign and featured placement on their home screen. Three months later, less than two percent of their active users had tried it even once, and engagement with their core matching features had dropped by fourteen percent because the interface had become cluttered and confusing. The feature cost them £140k to build and was quietly removed in a subsequent update.

Push Notification Mistakes That Kill User Engagement

Simon Lee — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Push notifications can be one of the most powerful tools for keeping users engaged with your app... but they can also be one of the fastest ways to get people to uninstall it. After ten years of building apps for clients in healthcare, fintech, and ecommerce, I've seen businesses make the same mistakes over and over again, and the data doesn't lie when it comes to how quickly users will abandon an app that annoys them with poorly thought-out notifications.

Mobile App Regulatory Approval: 5 Critical Steps to Success

Simon Lee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:44:40 GMT

A sports fitness app spent eighteen months building a platform that tracked athlete performance data and connected users with personal trainers. The development went smoothly, the interface looked great, and early beta testers loved it. They launched in the UK without any regulatory checks, and within six weeks they received a letter from the Information Commissioner's Office flagging serious data protection issues. The app was storing health data without proper consent mechanisms, sharing information with third parties without clear documentation, and using analytics tools that weren't compliant with GDPR. They had to pull the app from the store, rebuild core features, and delay their European expansion by eight months... all because they treated regulatory approval as an afterthought rather than a core part of the development process.

Why Most App Funding Rounds Fail (And How to Win)

Simon Lee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:16:18 GMT

More than half of all funding rounds for app startups never close, and a good portion of founders give up after their first serious rejection from investors. This failure rate stays high across seed rounds through Series A, and the pattern repeats itself with different teams making the same mistakes year after year. After watching dozens of funding attempts from both sides of the table (and helping clients prepare their own pitches), the issues that derail these deals are surprisingly predictable, which means they're also preventable if you know what to look for.

Why Your Development Team Keeps Missing Deadlines

Simon Lee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Around 75% of software development projects fail to meet their original deadlines, and mobile app projects tend to run even later than traditional software builds. Having spent a decade building apps across healthcare, fintech and e-commerce sectors, I can tell you that late deliveries are rarely about lazy developers or unrealistic clients... they're about a collection of predictable problems that keep showing up on nearly every project, and most people don't spot them until the timeline has already blown out by weeks or months.

Why Your App's Biggest Competitor Isn't Who You Think

Simon Lee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

When we run competitor analysis workshops with new clients, most arrive with a list of apps that look similar to theirs... but after a decade of building apps across healthcare, fintech and retail, I can tell you that the apps stealing your users aren't always the ones you've mapped out on your competitive matrix. The real competition often comes from places that won't show up in any app store search, and missing this can mean spending six months building features that solve the wrong problem entirely.

Why Your App Keeps Getting Rejected Over Privacy Settings

Simon Lee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

App store rejections for privacy issues have become one of the most frustrating roadblocks for developers, and I've watched this problem grow steadily worse over the past five years as both Apple and Google have tightened their requirements. The rejection email usually arrives within 48 hours of submission (sometimes within minutes if the automated systems catch something obvious), and the explanation often feels vague or confusing, leaving you wondering what exactly went wrong with your privacy implementation. I've probably walked about 50 different clients through this exact situation, and the pattern is always the same... they thought they'd covered everything, ticked all the boxes during submission, but still got that dreaded "we've identified one or more issues with your submission" message. The frustration compounds when you're working to a deadline, when you've got users waiting for features, when every day of delay costs money in development resources and missed market opportunities.

OWASP API Security Risks Every Mobile Developer Must Know

Simon Lee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Apps with security flaws are rejected by Apple and Google at rates that have tripled in recent years, and the main culprit behind most of these rejections is poor API security. I've been building mobile apps for a decade now, and I can tell you that API security has gone from being an afterthought to being one of the first things we discuss with every client. The truth is that most data breaches in mobile apps happen not because of sophisticated hacking techniques, but because developers overlook basic security principles that OWASP has been documenting for years. You might build the most beautiful app with perfect functionality, but if your API security has holes in it then you're essentially leaving the back door wide open for anyone who knows where to look.

Why Your CFO Keeps Saying No to Your App Budget

Simon Lee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A retail fashion brand spent £140k building a mobile shopping app that promised to boost revenue by thirty percent within the first year. Six months after launch, the app had been downloaded only eight thousand times and generated less than £12k in sales... the CFO blocked every technology budget request for the next eighteen months, and the marketing director who championed the project left the company shortly after. Your chief financial officer isn't being difficult when they push back on your app budget, they're protecting the business from what they've learned are high-risk investments that rarely deliver the returns promised in those glossy pitch decks.