I approached Dominic Michael Ferkin & Keith De Alwis at Creation Application to create an iOS app for me. I was asked what my budget was which I said was £20,000 and surprise they came back with a quote of £20,000. I assumed that price was acceptable as long as the app was made really well and within a few months. I was a bit hesitant as it was a lot of money and nearly all of my savings but they assured that the app would be built to a really high standard and made within a few months. All seemed to be going well until after a couple of months the iOS developers (who were in Sri Lanka) said that they had a problem with the XML data feed from the data provider.
At the time I didn't realize it but for a developer to have problems with an XML data feed (there was nothing wrong with the data feed) should have been a huge concern. As time progressed it seemed that the app wasn't working any where near as it should have been and clearly the developers weren't really up to the task of building the app. Bearing in mind that the app was a fairly simple, straight forward app in design. Even after a year the developers still couldn't get the app to work. I then took the app to another iOS developer in the UK and he said that as it was so badly written he would have to re-write the whole app from scratch but it would only take him four days to do it which he did.
The app now works fine as required. So basically they charged me over £21,000 to partly build an app that didn't work properly. And I later found out that they paid the Sri Lankan developer a fraction of that. So they got to keep most of the money. And they even tried to get more money out of me by including in the contract a part where they would host the app on a server for a period of two years. Turns out that this was another ploy to get more money out of me as the app is running fine on it's own. Dominic Michael Ferkin is now a director at Salpo Technologies Ltd. Keith De Alwis is now working as Chief Technology & Operations Officer at Telenor Health.