App rescue and modernisation for platforms that are failing.

There is no honest upfront price for a rescue, and any agency that gives you one has guessed. We cannot know what is under the hood until we look, so every rescue starts with a technical audit: codebase quality, architecture, data model, dependencies, infrastructure, crash analytics and security. The audit produces a severity-ranked findings list, a recommended path and a scoped price for the work itself, and it is scoped per platform after a free consultation.

Where the audit concludes the platform can be stabilised and refactored, the work is priced case by case against those findings. Where it concludes the codebase is beyond salvaging, the rebuild is priced through the standard PixelForce engagement structure: Phase 1 Scoping and Design typically $35,000 to $65,000, then Phase 2 Development, QA and Release typically $100,000 to $350,000, where $350,000 is a recommendation rather than a ceiling. A rebuild usually sits at the upper end of its scope, because it must also migrate your existing data and move your current users across without them noticing. Every figure is an envelope shaped by scope, never a fixed quote off a rate card.

Whether to rebuild or refactor a failing app is the most expensive decision in an app rescue, and it is answered by the technical audit rather than assumed, because there are three realistic paths rather than two.

That is the single most expensive decision in an app rescue, and it is exactly what the audit exists to answer. There are three realistic paths, not two. Refactoring improves the existing codebase in place and is right when the core architecture is sound, most features work, and the technology is modern but poorly implemented. Replatforming preserves the business logic while moving to a supported framework, and is right when the code is salvageable but the platform underneath it is not. A rebuild starts fresh with modern architecture, and is right when the technology is deprecated, the architecture cannot scale no matter what you do to it, or the cost of fixing approaches the cost of replacing.

Most platforms we audit need selective refactoring of the critical systems rather than a complete rebuild, and we will say so even though it is the smaller engagement. Move With Us is the example: rather than rebuild, we refactored the user program engine from duplicated per-user data to templates, and the core workout table shrank from 42GB to 0.9GB, 98 percent smaller, with database CPU peaks falling from 40 percent to under 5 percent.

Yes, PixelForce takes over apps built by another developer or agency, and inherited platforms are the majority of our rescue work, including builds whose original team has moved on entirely.

Yes. Inherited platforms are the majority of our rescue work - apps built by teams that have moved on, offshore builds that cannot scale, and codebases with no documentation and no tests. We rescued the Train With Cass fitness app through a seamless handover from the previous developer, taking the crash rate down 90 percent, achieving 99 percent uptime and cutting maintenance costs 50 percent.

What we need to start is read access to the repository, the app store and cloud accounts, and whatever documentation exists, which is often none. We do not need the previous team to cooperate, though it helps. If they are unresponsive or the relationship has broken down, the audit reconstructs the picture from the code and the infrastructure instead.

How long an app rescue takes is decided by what the technical audit finds, but stabilisation lands first and fast: across 15+ rescues in the past 3 years, crash rates are typically cut 50 to 70 percent within 2 weeks.

It depends on what the audit finds, which is why we do not publish a timeline before we have run one. What we can say from the pattern across 15+ rescues in the past 3 years is that stabilisation lands first and lands fast: crash rates are typically cut 50 to 70 percent within 2 weeks, because the highest-impact defects are usually a small number of concentrated failures rather than a diffuse problem across the whole codebase.

Deeper technical debt elimination and modernisation take longer, because they are structural rather than surgical. The payoff is measurable on the other side - feature development runs 60 to 80 percent faster after modernisation, which is the number that actually decides whether the rescue was worth doing.

Technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts, outdated dependencies and architectural decisions that made sense at the time and do not any more. It compounds quietly. You do not see it as a line item, you see it as simple changes taking weeks, every fix breaking something else, and new developers taking months to become useful.

Measuring it is the first job of the audit. We profile the codebase for coupling and duplication, check dependency currency and support status, review test coverage, examine the data model and query patterns, and read the crash and performance telemetry. The output is not a score, it is a ranked list of what is actually costing you money, ordered by business impact rather than by technical elegance, so the first thing we fix is the thing bleeding hardest.

The warning signs that an app needs rescuing are commercial before they are technical: sliding app store ratings, rising crash analytics, simple changes taking weeks, and infrastructure bills growing faster than the user base.

The reliable signals are commercial before they are technical. App store ratings sliding from above 4.5 towards the high threes, with reviews naming crashes and slowness. Crash analytics trending upward. Load times and animations degrading release over release. Simple feature requests taking weeks because every change risks breaking something else. Infrastructure bills growing faster than your user base. Dependencies with known vulnerabilities and failed security audits. App Store or Google Play warning about deprecated APIs. The original developers gone and nobody wanting to take over the codebase. Retention declining with app quality cited as the reason.

Any one of those has ordinary explanations. Three or more together is a structural problem, and structural problems do not resolve themselves - they get more expensive every quarter you leave them.

Yes, a legacy iOS or Android app can usually be modernised without a full rebuild where the architecture underneath is sound, and incremental migration in stages is the cheaper answer in that situation.

Usually, yes, and that is the cheaper answer when the architecture underneath is sound. Legacy app modernisation is incremental by design: migrating Objective-C to Swift and UIKit to SwiftUI on iOS, Java to Kotlin and XML layouts to Jetpack Compose on Android, bringing frameworks and dependencies onto supported versions, modernising the API layer, and upgrading authentication to current standards such as OAuth 2.0, single sign-on and biometrics.

Each of those can be done in stages against a running product, which matters because most rescue clients cannot afford to stop shipping while the work happens. The exception is a platform built on technology that no longer has a migration path at all. That is a replatform or a rebuild, and the audit will say so plainly rather than sell you an upgrade that cannot work.

Keeping your users unaffected during an app rescue is a design constraint at PixelForce rather than a hope: we rescued the Move With Us platform, which serves 200,000+ users, with zero business interruption during the fix.

Keeping the business running through the rescue is a design constraint, not a hope. We rescued the Move With Us platform, which serves 200,000+ users, with crash rates reduced 50 percent, app performance improved 40 percent, user satisfaction up 30 percent, and zero business interruption during the fix.

The way that is achieved is unglamorous: monitoring and crash reporting go in before anything is changed, so the effect of every release is visible. Work ships in small increments behind staged rollouts rather than as one large cutover. On the Move With Us refactor, programming changes now reach users instantly with no workout reboot, which was itself part of the outcome. Where a full rebuild is the answer, the migration plan for existing data and existing users is scoped before development begins, not improvised at the end.

An application modernisation project changes six things, in roughly this order: observability, stability, performance, structure, security and documentation, with infrastructure cost usually falling out of the same work.

Six things, in roughly this order. Observability, so failures are visible instead of inferred from reviews. Stability, through crash elimination, memory-leak fixes and edge-case handling. Performance, through profiling, query and index work, caching and asset optimisation. Structure, through refactoring the coupled areas, introducing automated tests and establishing CI/CD so a fix can ship the same week. Security, through dependency patching, authentication hardening, encryption in transit and at rest, and the compliance obligations that apply to your market. Documentation, so the knowledge lives in the repository rather than in one person.

Infrastructure cost usually falls out of the same work, and our rescue engagements routinely cut server costs 30 to 50 percent. Where cloud architecture and cost optimisation is the primary problem rather than the application itself, that is covered on our cloud infrastructure and DevOps page.

Yes, you own the code and the infrastructure after a PixelForce rescue, because your intellectual property transfers to you on full payment under our Services Agreement and your platform is hosted on your own cloud account.

Yes. Your intellectual property is yours, it transfers to you on full payment under our Services Agreement, and your platform is hosted on your own cloud account rather than ours. That is deliberate, because a rescue client has usually just learned what it costs to be locked out of your own product by a previous vendor.

It also means the handover at the end is real. You leave with a documented codebase, automated tests, working CI/CD pipelines and monitoring you can read, so a future team - ours, yours or someone else entirely - can pick the platform up without a second rescue. PixelForce is an AWS Advanced Tier Partner with 15+ AWS-accredited engineers, and holds a 99.99 percent uptime rate across 100+ shipped products.

Choose an app rescue and modernisation company by insisting on a technical audit before a price. Any provider quoting a rescue figure before reading your codebase, infrastructure and crash analytics has guessed, and the guess will be wrong in one direction or the other.

Ask four questions. What does the audit actually cover: codebase quality, architecture, data model, dependencies, infrastructure, crash analytics and security, or only the parts that are quick to look at? Will you tell us when refactoring is the right answer rather than a rebuild, given the rebuild is the larger engagement? How will the product keep running for existing users while the work happens? And what do we hold at the end: documented code, automated tests, working pipelines and monitoring, or a working app that nobody else can maintain?

Check the ownership terms in writing before you sign. Your intellectual property should transfer to you and your platform should sit on your own cloud account, because being locked out of your own product by a previous vendor is very often what caused the rescue in the first place. Finally, ask for rescue outcomes with numbers attached - crash rate, uptime, maintenance cost - rather than adjectives.