Lickability

I’m the iOS lead for Houseparty, which is a product by Epic Games. It’s a social video chat app on iOS, Android, and the web.

We have a big team but wanted more throughput and a really high standard for our iOS app. We brought Lickability on to help us build high-quality features for the iOS app and build more features at once.

We have an ongoing contract with Lickability for two years. They’re a solid part of our iOS team. During this time, they’ve consistently delivered technical work and product work for the iOS app. They’ve even taken on some driving roles on projects.

We have three developers who all serve as software engineers.

They’ve been working with Houseparty since before I joined.

We’ve invested over $1 million.

Our ongoing engagement started around January 2017.

The metrics we look at are the crash rate of the app and the quality of the experience, which is qualitative. Everyone on the team is using the app constantly, both for testing and personal use. We look at the quality of the app. Specifically for Lickability, we look at the quality of the features they work on as well as their communication. They excel along all those dimensions.

They’re great with project management. Their team is good at translating requirements in the code. They excel in reading technical specs and then understanding what’s missing, what’s there, and what needs to be clarified.

They have an incredibly rare combination of humility and expertise. There are expert developers and there are humble developers, but finding both in the same package isn’t common. All three developers are an incredible mix of top-tier excellence in engineering but they’re also really humble and easy to work with.

No, nothing comes to mind. They excel in everything we care about.

Ask them for insight and questions outside the direct scope of work. they have a lot of experience working across a lot of different projects and ideas. You can give them a scope of work and they’ll absolutely nail it. But you’ll get a lot more out of it if you ask and listen to their answers around best practices and recommendations for the project.

I’m a strategy and operations teammate at a media company.

We needed help to scope and understand an iOS engineering problem.

Lickability provided consulting services to help us scope and understand an iOS engineering problem. They helped us build out a couple of prototypes. We worked with Figma and Bitrise. The team worked with our existing codebase but built everything from scratch. Their prototypes were shipped.

We worked with 4–5 people, including a project manager, a partner, a staff engineer, and a senior account manager.

I’d like to give a shout-out to mb and Michael.

We had done some work with them years ago, and they were recommended to us by an industry peer.

We spent between $75,000–$100,000.

We worked together from October 2024–March 2025.

Lickability was phenomenal. They built great prototypes that have already started to work.

They were on time and communicated seamlessly. The team was super organized. We used Jira and Notion for project management and Slack and Google Meet for communication.

I’d like to give a shout-out to mb and Michael.

The depth of their knowledge and flexibility were impressive.

I don't have any notes; they were great.

Go for Lickability.

I’m the founder of a small app studio. We’re building an app to help with the downsizing and moving process.

We needed a partner who knew apps really well. We had bootstrapped our way through building a couple of early prototypes. We reached out to Lickability to help us reset the product and build it into a proper app, leaning on their expertise in the mobile app space.

Initially, we had a functional app on the App Store that we were marketing and selling. Lickability helped us rethink that app and worked through it to distill its core flow into something much simpler than we had originally built. Lickability worked with us to identify the core user flow and problem, using our user research and conversations to simplify the app's flow. The app was built for iOS using Swift, and Lickability focused on product design and ultimately delivered a functional prototype.

We worked with a designer, a project manager, and MB.

I had been in touch with Lickability for a while because they were one of the more prominent studios in this space. I had some early conversations with Thomas, who contacted me when I joined a Slack community for iOS developers.

We worked together from October–November 2024.

We haven’t put the app into engineering yet, so we don’t have any metrics to share. However, the Lickability team did excellent work.

Lickability met deadlines. We had a quick and limited three-week engagement. We communicated via email and Slack.

Although it was great working with all of them, Sam did the bulk of the work — I appreciated his work.

The two things that stood out were Lickability's work and professionalism. Additionally, Lickability made themselves available quickly for a relatively unstructured engagement, which was exactly what I was looking for.

It’s hard to think of improvements for Lickability. I could've paid more and received other things. Given our limitations, we did a good job as a collaborative team of finding ways to get a lot of value out of the engagement.

Make sure you have clarity on the scope and project timelines, as well as a shared understanding of what the scope includes. Always remember that it’s your job as the client to stay on top of communication. At every check-in, make sure you tell Lickability what happened, give them feedback, let them know what you expected from them, and ask what is needed from you so that you aren’t the hold-up.

I'm the senior director of product and design for an ultrasound hardware and software manufacturer. We build hand-held ultrasound devices and hospital integration systems. In my role, I oversee the design of our entire software architecture.

We needed help with mobile app design for some of our product's key components.

Lickability became our mobile design partner about two and a half years ago. The team designed features for our mobile app, such as the user onboarding workflow. Whenever we ideated new features, we first worked on the wireframes, and we then reached out to Lickability to standardize those wireframes for the iOS platform. Basically, they brought good Apple standards into our design language.To create the user onboarding workflow, Lickability helped us design the tutorials, which included creating animations from scratch. In addition to that, their team helped us create a notifications module. For this particular feature, we first created a prototype and some wireframes, and they took our designs to the next level.Although our product includes web and mobile apps, we mostly worked with Lickability on the mobile side of things. Still, towards the end of our latest project, we did give them a small project on how to better lay out our web app. For this particular project, we wanted to revise the navigation because there were a couple of components coming together. Therefore, we needed help from an external point of view to standardize the layout hierarchy.As for the technology stack, Lickability followed the industry standard. Their design tools included Figma, Adobe, and other standard animation tools. The team also offered development services, but we didn't need them.

We worked with two main designers from Lickability. The founder was one of those designers, and he played a crucial role in helping us better work through certain solutions. I also recall working with a project manager and someone on the legal side of things who helped us with the finance and billings. Overall, I met around 4–5 members of their team.

My CEO introduced me to them. He's a big fan of The New Yorker, so he found them through there. Lickability's attention to detail was outstanding. Although UX and visual design are not high on the priorities list for medical companies, my team and I disagree and believe that cognitive loads and the likability of a product are very important to ensure success.Therefore, we wanted to work with someone who understood that and paid a lot of attention to decluttering a product to reduce the cognitive load. Our domain itself is very heavy, as it deals with ultrasounds and patients. Hence, we wanted to ensure a lot of familiarity with the software so users didn't feel like it existed a learning curve to engage and leverage our product.We ultimately chose Lickability because they were attentive and focused on creating minimalistic designs to reduce the cognitive workload.

Lickability's services cost an average of $3,500–$4,500 per month, but we didn't use them every month. Overall, we spent around $45,000 per year with them.

We worked together from June 2021–March 2024. Currently, our team is implementing all the designs and deploying the new features to our customers. Still, whenever we need more features, we'll definitely reach out to them again.

Measuring success for Lickability is a little tricky. We never iterated over a feature once it was built. Usually, the foundation of their work was pretty solid, but my in-house design team could still take it to the next level — at the end of the day, it was a collaboration. What I can say is that whatever work Lickability did was, in one way or another, leveraged by my team.The quality of Lickability's work met our expectations. They were very open to us using their designs as the baseline to further enhance them to meet our needs. Their designs were not restrictive in any way, and overall, we really liked collaborating with them.

Lickability always delivered on time and responded well to our needs — they were a fantastic partner in that regard. Their project management was on point, and they had great minutes for meetings. They were also great at follow-ups. Whenever we had to deliver a document for them to proceed with a feature, they were very hands-on with reminders.Similarly, if Lickability had to deliver something to us, they ensured to communicate the expectations and delivered on time. Their team was based in New York, and we were in California, so we mainly communicated via Zoom and Google Meet calls. We also shared some Slack channels.

Sam (Product Designer) delivered fantastic work. Although he was still a student, he was very keen, smart, and dedicated; we really enjoyed working with him. Thomas (Senior Account Manager), who was on the legal and billing side of things, was quite wonderful as well.Moreover, although MB (CEO) didn't have experience working with medical devices before, they were quite keen on the learning space. They were also great at decluttering interfaces according to what users wanted to make everything cohesive and streamline the requirements. Overall, Lickability's entire team was fantastic.

Lickability was great. They did work that I liked and were very customer-focused.

There was nothing Lickability could have improved on. If anything, I wish I learned how to manage a good work-life balance from them. They worked a four-day work week, which was something I took back to my team. However, we couldn't implement it because we're workaholics.

Something that really helped me work with Lickability was finding a way to break the domain barrier. When possible, we found similarities between our different domains, and my team always broke down our industry into a more digestible form to help them understand. At the end of the day, Lickability is there to help you, so the more you bridge that knowledge gap, the better.

I'm the engineering manager and senior engineer at a startup company based in New York that is building a new web browser.

We needed support to build native applications for Apple devices and iOS systems since we had limited resources. We hired Lickability to help us improve the processes and tooling of our existing app in order to save time for our team.

Initially, we shared with Lickability a list of projects we had sourced internally based on feedback from my colleagues. We also shared the source code of our application with the team so they could examine the underlying code and functionality. We then had a kick-off meeting to review the projects, discuss their impact and effort, and prioritize work accordingly. Lickability also worked on development ergonomics projects and provided tools to make our work more efficient. The last project Lickability worked on was regarding research to validate a development concept we had.

Over the course of the engagement, I worked directly with three teammates from Lickability and indirectly with 4–5 team members.

We spent around $150,000 on this project.

We started working with Lickability in February 2024, and the project lasted 16 weeks.

Lickability delivered the results we were looking for, and the engagement saved us money. Our company works on software development, and over the past four years of our life cycle, the development process began to take a lot of time. We hired Lickability to improve that. As a result, our build process took 30%–40% less time, which saved us money. Lickability's development ergonomics project gave us tools that made our work easier. We were pleased with Lickability's work. We'd love to keep the partnership going; however, our company is at a stage where we're focusing on other things right now. We'd be delighted to engage with Lickability again in the future.

Ken (Staff iOS Engineer) was phenomenal and a very talented engineer. He was easy to work with. I also want to highlight Thomas (Senior Account Manager) and Brian (Partner).

When we started the engagement, we had to figure out how to work with Lickability. The team came into the engagement expecting to be of service to us and have us tell them what they needed to do. However, I wanted Lickability to tell us what we should do because they were the experts. After a week of getting to know each other, I gave the team that feedback, and they were very quick to take action on it, which was great.

I can't think of anything Lickability could improve.

Something we did that helped us was having asynchronous daily updates. Lickability posted in the morning what they planned on working on and if they needed anything from us, and we would do the same. That kind of visibility was really helpful because people across our entire company could look at what Lickability was working on, which helped us keep work on track. We started doing this about two weeks into the project, and my suggestion to other clients is to do it since the beginning of the engagement.