Questions people ask before starting a software project.
Definitions, distinctions and decision guidance, written to be useful whether or not you ever work with us. Each answer links to the page that covers it properly.
Who we are and how we work, for anyone deciding whether to get in touch.
What does ABM Solutions do?
ABM Solutions is a software development company in Lahore, Pakistan. We design, build and support digital products: mobile apps, web applications, websites, custom business software and AI features, along with API integration, app maintenance, technical audits and App Store Optimisation.
Work is taken on either as a project with an agreed scope or as an ongoing arrangement for a product that is already live. Where a packaged product would serve a client better than something custom, we say so.
In Lahore, Pakistan: Office No 1, 2nd Floor, Plaza No 22, Block-K, Phase 1C, DHA, Lahore Cantt. Projects are delivered remotely for clients elsewhere, and clients in Lahore are welcome to visit.
Six stages: discover, design, build, test, launch and support. Each stage produces something you can open and check — a scope document, a clickable prototype, a staging build, a test report, a live product — so progress is visible rather than reported.
Scope, timeline and cost are agreed in writing before development starts, and nothing moves to the next stage without your sign-off.
You do. Source code repositories, hosting and any Apple or Google developer accounts are set up in your name, with documentation at handover, so the product can be moved to another team at any point.
The distinctions that decide what a project actually is, and what it will cost.
What is custom software development?
Custom software development is building an application specifically for one organisation, shaped around its own processes, data and rules, rather than configuring a product sold to everyone. It typically includes a database, a back end, an interface for the people doing the work, integrations with existing tools, and access control so each role sees only what it should.
It earns its cost where the process is genuinely specific to the business, where workarounds have become expensive, or where the same information lives in several systems that never agree. Where an off-the-shelf product fits, it is usually the cheaper answer.
A website is mainly read: it presents the same content to every visitor and its job is to explain and convert. A web app is used: people sign in, work with their own records, and the software enforces rules about what each person can do.
The practical consequence is cost and complexity. A web app needs a database, an authentication system, permissions and a plan for what happens when two people change the same record. If your project needs logins and data that changes, it is an application, whatever it is called.
When the biggest risk is whether anyone wants the product, rather than whether it can be built. An MVP is a complete, working version of one thing, released to real users to find out. If demand is already proven — you are replacing a system people use daily — an MVP adds a step instead of removing risk.
An MVP is not a prototype. A prototype demonstrates an idea and is thrown away; an MVP is live software, built on foundations the full product can keep using.
Cross-platform frameworks such as React Native and Flutter use one codebase for iOS and Android, which is usually faster to build and cheaper to maintain. Native is worth the extra cost when the app depends heavily on platform-specific features, heavy graphics or very tight performance requirements.
The decision belongs in scoping and should follow what the app has to do, not a general preference.
What integration and AI actually involve, once the terminology is removed.
What is API integration?
API integration is connecting two pieces of software so they exchange data automatically through a defined interface, instead of a person exporting from one system and importing into another. A typical integration listens for an event in one system, transforms the data, and writes it into another.
The difficult parts are rarely the request itself: they are authentication, handling the case where the other system is unavailable, avoiding duplicate processing, and deciding which system is the source of truth when two disagree.
In practice it means using machine-learning models, usually large language models, on information that a person currently has to read: documents, forms, emails and reports. Common uses are extracting data into structured records, classifying and routing incoming work, summarising long material, and answering questions from a company's own documents.
The engineering work is mostly around the model rather than in it: getting the right source material in front of it, keeping answers grounded in that material, measuring quality against known-good examples, and deciding where a human has to approve the result.
Enterprise software is software built for organisations where the complexity is organisational as well as technical: several departments, existing systems that cannot be switched off, rules about who may see what, and a requirement that nothing stops working during the change.
Most of the cost sits in integration, data migration and permissions rather than in the screens people see.
What happens to software once it is live, and what to do when it goes wrong.
What is app maintenance?
App maintenance is the continuing work that keeps live software working: monitoring so failures are detected rather than reported by users, fixing defects in priority order, applying security and dependency updates, keeping up with operating system and app store changes, and making small improvements.
Software decays even when nobody touches it. Operating systems update every year, libraries get security advisories, store requirements change and certificates expire. An app left alone for two years is not stable; it is untested against everything that has changed.
By reviewing the code, architecture, security, performance and operations of the system as it actually exists, and writing the findings up with each one ranked by impact and by the effort to fix it. A meaningful audit needs read access to the repositories, and ideally to the hosting and monitoring as well.
Audits are usually commissioned before investing in software someone else built, when a project has stopped progressing, or when something is failing in production and nobody can say why. The output is a decision: repair, replace, or leave alone.
App Store Optimisation (ASO) is improving how an app is found and chosen inside the Apple App Store and Google Play: the keywords it ranks for, the title, subtitle and description, and the icon and screenshots that decide whether somebody taps install.
It is not the same as web SEO. Store ranking is concentrated in a handful of fields weighted heavily towards the title and keywords, and install rate is driven mostly by the icon and first two screenshots. Neither store publishes its ranking rules, so ASO is a cycle of controlled changes and measurement.
