Advise please

jsa986

As suggested by a member I would like to ask for some of your advice on contract law on this forum


In June of this year i approached a software developer to produce an iPhone app for me.

We had a couple of web meetings and a price was agreed and i was informed that they estimated it would be competed and on the app store mid august. We are now in november and my app is still not complete. More than seven deadlines for completion have been missed. Moreover the actual BETA (test) app they delivered earlier this month, crashed and was not to spec even basic spelling was not correct. I since found they are farming out the coding to India I have paid 50% of the cost of the app upfront.

It was made clear to them that a competitor was developing a similar app when they found out about mine was in development, theres was out in August. Suffice to say i have lost a huge amount of potential customers who have used my competitors app and i cant get the developers to finish my project. In summary I have paid a thousand pounds up front for a app that was expected in August and have nothing to show for it.

What would your advise be for my next step, when I challenged them on the delays i keep getting fobbed off with "thats the nature of app development" Can i request my original money back as app is not fit for purpose and breach of contract for timescale? Do i have to give them a timescale first to put the app right? bearing in mind its three months late.


There is no contract with delivery dates as predicted. I have an email stating

"This is extremely well timed and we should be in a position to have your app ready within 4 weeks."

Am i right in saying contracts dont have to be the traditional sighed variety and can be implied? Also would there be a reasonable time factor in all this? Based on the companies statement of four week program i bought there services. Id not have used them if thought it would be four months.

As no face to face contact has been made have i got any redress under distance selling regs?

Company is a LTD concern, not some guy in his bedroom thankfully!

The real issue here is that the guy who initially took my order massively underestimated the time this would take and now is dragging this out as i think all his profit has gone out of the project.

If I issue county court action im concerned i would have a counter claim against me for the work they have done and i have to take it up the tail pipe twice!

Ive had conversation after conversation with them and its just a hit a brick wall now.

Thanks in advance

texranger

jsa986 wrote: »

Company is a LTD concern, not some guy in his bedroom thankfully!

what makes you think this, anyone can set up a limited company for as little as £15

surely you would have had a written contract drawn up with completion date especially if you are paying £1000 upfront and again on completion, so at least you have a clause in if the work was not completed on time their would be penalties.

but reading the below comment, this is something you never had. BAD mistake

jsa986 wrote: »

There is no contract with delivery dates as predicted. I have an email stating

jsa986

Yes bad error of judgement on my part not getting a contract

Annisele

I can't see the distance selling regs helping you. Their full name is "The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations" - and yours sounds like a business to business transaction.

You might end up with less protection dealing with a limited company than you would with an individual. If the limited company has no assets, you're stuffed. At least if it was some guy in his bedroom you could sue him for the bedroom!

Without a written contract, I think you'll struggle to show what was agreed. You really don't get much development work for £2k, and it sounds as though both you and the developer might have badly underestimated the work involved. Can you show that the £2k was for a working app, and not just for some preliminary dev work?

Another problem is that you're saying this should have been finished in July/August, and we're now in November. What - if anything - did you do when your seven previous deadlines were missed?

AliceJenkins

LTD is far worse, LTD responsibility.

jsa986

Annisele wrote: »

I can't see the distance selling regs helping you. Their full name is "The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations" - and yours sounds like a business to business transaction.

You might end up with less protection dealing with a limited company than you would with an individual. If the limited company has no assets, you're stuffed. At least if it was some guy in his bedroom you could sue him for the bedroom!

Without a written contract, I think you'll struggle to show what was agreed. You really don't get much development work for £2k, and it sounds as though both you and the developer might have badly underestimated the work involved. Can you show that the £2k was for a working app, and not just for some preliminary dev work?

Another problem is that you're saying this should have been finished in July/August, and we're now in November. What - if anything - did you do when your seven previous deadlines were missed?

Interesting point about the bedroom!

I agree the developer has underestimated the work involved, as a lay person i had no idea the cost or work involved in app development, im bit wiser now! I thought 2k was a lot of money for an app? I've rewired houses for less han that!

Yes i have a planned schedule of works but no definitive date for completion. spart from the fact i bought the services of the company based on the proposal of four weeks.

I have every single week pressed this company for a completion date. Every time its gone past that i have challenged it. Each time i get fobbed off. I have made them very aware that this app is time critical and can evidence that via a paper trail of emails.

Sounds like im screwed from the comments on here though.

texranger

paper trail of emails means nothing the same as a planned schedule of works, you should of had a written and signed contract attached to the schedule of work

without a signed contract this developer could of made the app and sold it himself and you would be in the same boat, nothing legal to say you commissioned the work for your usage

Annisele

jsa986 wrote: »

I agree the developer has underestimated the work involved, as a lay person i had no idea the cost or work involved in app development, im bit wiser now! I thought 2k was a lot of money for an app? I've rewired houses for less han that!

It very much depends on what sort of app you're building. To use your analogy, I'd expect rewiring a one bedroom flat to be significantly cheaper than rewiring Canary Wharf. The size of development projects isn't always obvious to a non-developer (and they're regularly not obvious to developers either...).

£2k really isn't much for an app. You certainly can develop an app for £2k - but you can also pay a hundred times more.

Demonstrating that the software isn't of acceptable quality may also be difficult. All software has bugs (at least, all software with more than a dozen lines of code has bugs). If you did sue, I can't see how you'd demonstrate that the code quality was unacceptable without an expert report - and that might well cost you more than you are trying to recover.

What do you want to happen now?

A claim for specific performance isn't going to get you anywhere - sounds as though the developer either can't or won't produce what you want, and even if he could you wanted it months ago.

A claim for damages is a possibility - but then you might already have £1k worth of code, and in any case you'd be likely to get a counter-claim for the £1k you haven't yet paid.

Do you have the source code? Do you know enough to be able to come with any kind of estimate of whether the code you've got is worth what you've paid?

paddyrg

The developer was an idiot for not knowing how to price and schedule the job accurately - sadly there are thousands of people like that, and it is hard for the lay-person to navigate.

A professional software house would have taken your business spec, worked with you to a functional spec (what happens when you press this button, etc., quite low level), then a tech spec. And you would have agreed a set of sign-off criteria before starting the job (otherwise how can you ever tell if the job is over?). This, however, would probably have cost you the best part of that £2k with a professional company before the first line of code is cut. But only after doing all that can you come up with an accurate price for development and an accurate timescale. Otherwise he's just guessing, and clearly guessed wrongly.

All IT development is effectively R&D work, custom software is always VERY expensive.

Mistral001

A contract does not have to be pages of documents signed at the bottom. A verbal contract can be just as binding. Even a exchange of emails stating what they will provide and at what cost and your acceptance of this is a binding contract and is just as enforceable in law as a fully signed contract with bells and whistles (although the lawyers like to have something they can read rather than depend on the evidence given verbally in court, bless them).

However, in saying that, it seems that the completion date in the email you got is very woolly and might be difficult to act on in law I would imagine. A telephone call where the the developer stated that it would be ready in 4 weeks would actually stand up better than what you got.

You perhaps need to pay a visit to this firm. If they are at the other end of the country, a plane journey would not be out of the question for the sake of £2000 in my view. Get the address of the company and look for them on Google street view. That might be an accommodation address, but it is a start to actually getting to see this person. You might end up with getting some of your money back or getting the job pushed forward. However, most of all you will find out what is going on with this firm and you will learn from the experience.

AliceJenkins

It's disgusting that all they've done is taken your money, and posted on a site like freelancer.com

What was the app? (just general functionality)