Who owns your app sounds like a legal question, and part of it is. The part that decides whether you can still ship next year is more ordinary: whose Apple account, whose Play Console, whose git organisation, whose signing key. In 2026 there is a further split, because an agent may have drafted the diff, and that does not tell you who holds the repository.
We hire out as dedicated developers, so read this with that in mind. The home page says the Davao team, managed from Antwerp, joins your team, your tools, your sprints and your codebase. That sentence is the offer. It is not a contract, and this article does not invent the clauses the site does not publish.
Two questions wearing one title
On 9 November we publish a separate article about Android developer verification. That one is about Google binding a package name, a certificate and an identity, and about what follows if an agency account registered the app. The figures, the fees and the dispute process live there, dated to the sources we checked. This article does not repeat them.
Android developer verification: what is enforced, and who owns the account
The question here is the one you can ask of any engagement, on either platform, before a line of code exists.
The things that need an owner
- The git host, and which organisation the repository lives in. "Your codebase" means the repo starts in yours, not that someone promises to zip it up later.
- The Apple Developer account, and who the Account Holder is in App Store Connect. Users can be invited. The Account Holder is not a role you want to discover at renewal.
- The Google Play Console account. The Android article is the detail on why the account that created the app is the identity Google verifies.
- The signing material. An iOS distribution certificate and an Android upload key are not interchangeable with "we have a copy somewhere".
- The bundle identifier and the package name. Both are painful to change once a store listing, a push topic or an associated domain points at them.
- The domain and the DNS. A backend the agency's registrar controls is not your backend, whatever the app binary says.
None of that depends on whether the screen is SwiftUI, Kotlin or a shared toolkit. Native or cross-platform changes who reviews the UI. It does not change whose name is on the account.
What our own products show
The contrast is the products we did not build for a client. FeedbackKit, Swiftly Workspace, and the open-source kits are published from github.com/Swiftly-Developed because they are ours. Swiftly-PDFKit, Swiftly-CMSKit and SwiftlyBotKit each name the MIT licence in the repository. Publishing a library under our org, under a licence that lets you vendor it, is a deliberate ownership choice.
A client app is the other choice. We do not publish your product under that org, and the home page does not say we do. The codebase line is "yours". If a proposal puts the repository in our organisation "for convenience", that is a different offer from the one on the site, and you should treat it as one.
Agents did not settle copyright
When a model drafts the change, two ownership questions get collapsed into one. The first is custody: who can merge, who can ship, who can revoke a key when the engagement ends. That one is practical, and you can check it this week. The second is copyright in the generated lines. That one is for your counsel. The staff-augmentation article says the same thing and does not pretend we have a ruling to hand you. Neither do I.
Staff augmentation when AI writes the code
Review still matters to custody. Someone who can explain the diff can also tell you whether it belongs in your repository. Someone who only forwards an agent's output cannot.
What to ask, us included
- On the first day, which accounts are already in the company's name?
- Who is invited as a user, and who is the Account Holder or the Play owner?
- Where do the signing keys live, and who besides the person typing can rotate them?
- What access is removed when the engagement stops, and is that written down?
- Does any of this change because an agent wrote the first draft? It should not.
The Android article's recommendation, labelled there as our inference and not as Google's guidance, is the Play-specific form of the same idea: publish from an account your company owns, and invite the people building it. For the Apple side and for the repository, the questions above are the whole checklist this site can stand behind. If you want them answered against a particular quote, the article on reading a quote is the companion.
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