About
An independent software studio
An independent software studio in Scotland. AKdev builds and publishes its own apps — Crub, KinopiQ and BusyWait — and takes on a small amount of work building apps for other people. Client work is limited to Scotland.
Every product AKdev publishes starts the same way. Something we needed, where what already existed was priced well beyond what the job was worth, or was available and simply not very good. That is the whole method, and it is why the apps look unrelated to each other: a plant identifier, an accreditation tracker and a calendar sync tool have nothing in common except that each one was a gap somebody had to keep working around.
It also sets the shape of them. A product built because we wanted it tends to be narrow, to stop where the job stops, and to be priced like a tool rather than a platform. There is no enterprise tier holding the useful part hostage, because there was never a version of this where that made sense.
The same goes for what is inside them. A model gets added when it does a job that needs doing, and not otherwise. Crub runs one because naming a plant from a photograph is a thing models are genuinely good at, and KinopiQ runs one because working out which of six standards a document is evidence for is an afternoon of tedium nobody should be spending. BusyWait has none and never will — keeping two calendars in agreement is arithmetic and a webhook, and putting a model behind it would burn real power to do a worse job than a loop already does perfectly. Inference costs electricity and water somewhere, and spending that so a product can say the word on its homepage is a trade we are not going to make. There is more on that here.
What we build
AKdev Ltd is a small independent software studio registered in Scotland, Companies House number SC892925. It designs, builds and publishes its own software. Rather than spreading products across several entities, everything we ship sits under a single accountable publisher, so it is always clear who stands behind an app. The current three are on the apps page.
We also take on a small amount of work building apps for other people, limited to Scotland. Small deliberately: it is capacity we can give properly without the products suffering for it.
How we work
The footprint stays small and the focus stays narrow. We develop and maintain every product in-house. One set of terms, privacy, security and support policies covers all of them, so a policy does not change depending on which app you happen to be using.
Being small cuts both ways and it is worth saying which ways. Support reaches the people who build the thing rather than a tier of it, so answers tend to be direct and reasonably quick. It also means work happens in an order rather than in parallel, and a request that would be a sprint at a larger studio may simply be a no here.
Get in touch
For business, partnership or support enquiries, email hello@ak.dev or use the contact page.
