Custom software development in Vietnam

• Internal management systems: HR, attendance, task assignment, approvals, inventory and orders, following your own approval flow and permissions.
• Customer and sales management: customer records, opportunities, quotes, contracts and after-sales care.
• Customer and partner portals: customers look up orders, contracts and balances or raise support requests; resellers order against their own price lists.
• Integrations with the software you already use: accounting, e-invoicing, payment gateways and company email, through an API or by reading data directly.
• Mobile apps for staff: attendance, field reports, task notifications and push alerts on iOS and Android.
• Automation and AI: generated reports, document reading and question answering over internal data, with logs and a human approver.

Custom software is not always the right answer, and we say so in discovery even when it makes the project smaller. The two lists below are the ones we use.

Build your own when

• Your process is a competitive advantage, and forcing it into packaged software would lose that advantage.
• You pay for several disconnected subscriptions and staff re-enter the same data in each of them.
• Per-user subscription fees, as headcount grows, exceed the cost of owning a system.
• Your data has to stay on your own servers for security or legal reasons.
• The packaged software you use has no API to connect it with other systems.

Buy off the shelf when

• The process is standard and existing software already covers most of it.
• You need something working within days, with no time for discovery.
• The budget only covers a monthly subscription.
• The process is not settled yet, and trying an existing product will show what you actually need.

The stack below is what we use in our own systems and propose by default. Every part is mainstream and open, so your company is not tied to ALODEV to maintain it.

Native, cross-platform or a wrapped website

For mobile, the first question is how people will actually open the app. An app is worth building when at least two of these hold: people open it several times a day; push notifications are central to the work, such as a new order or an approval waiting; or it needs device hardware such as the camera, location, Face ID, barcode scanning or background processing. Below that bar, a website that works well on phones is usually the better first step.

When an app is justified, React Native gives one codebase and one round of testing for both platforms, and suits teams that already work in React. Native Swift and Kotlin suit apps used every day that rely on device features. A web page wrapped in an app shell is quick to ship but risks rejection under Apple's App Review Guideline 4.2, which requires apps to offer more than a repackaged website, so we keep it for short-lived internal tools.

Connecting to existing systems

Older software without an API can usually still be connected, either by reading its data directly or through scheduled exports. We check this during discovery, before quoting, so the integration is not a surprise halfway through the project.

The clearest evidence of how we build is the software we depend on. ALODEV AIO is the operations system ALODEV runs every day for attendance, task assignment, approvals, leave, payroll, notifications, chat and documents. It has a Go backend with about 500 API routes, a native iPhone app in SwiftUI for iOS 17 and later with no third-party libraries, and an Android app in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose that is distributed internally.

Running it ourselves has taught us things we now apply to client projects. On 5 September 2026 we counted 403 clock-ins over 30 days: 367 of them, or 91%, came from a web browser, and the two mobile apps together accounted for 15. Staff work at computers and clock in there, which is why we build the web version of a business system first and add an app for what phones do better. Native code also has a cost: on 25 September 2026 the two native apps together came to 89,193 lines for one set of business rules, and every change to those rules has to be made twice.

ALODEV also publishes apps on the Apple App Store under the developer name ALODEV CO.,LTD.

Every custom software project runs on the same terms: a fixed price agreed per milestone, payment in three installments of 30%, 40% and 30% tied to acceptance of a working system, a lifetime warranty on delivered code, and source code, data and service accounts in your company's name. The details, including how scope changes are handled and what happens if a contract ends early, are on our software outsourcing page.