A single contractor is often the right call for an MVP. The signals it’s time to build a real mobile team: your release cadence is slowing because one person is a bottleneck, you’re maintaining iOS and Android as separate codebases with drifting feature parity, App Store reviews are flagging stability issues you don’t have bandwidth to chase down, or mobile is now a primary revenue channel rather than a companion to web.
If two or more of those are true, the cost of under-investing in mobile - slower releases, lower ratings, lost revenue - usually exceeds the cost of building the team out properly.
