Eight Bit Studios
Let’s create the world’s best mobile appsEight Bit Studios Overview
Eight Bit Studios combines raw talent with innovative ideas to produce first-class interactive productions. Specializing in mobile app development for native and web apps, viral web strategies, and enterprise web applications, our mission is simple: get people talking. We create exceptional customer experiences every step of the way. We put collaboration first. We are a smart, fun, rowdy, privately-owned group of pixel-slingers from the midwest, here to crush it for brands on their mobile and web initiatives.
BetterWeekdays and Finom, Dabble, Fooda, GiveForward, Glossre, Groupon, Guaranteed Rate, Hasbro, New Balance, The Chicago Fire, The Field Museum, The MacArthur Foundation, and Threadless, Trident, Wowzers.
- Mobile App Development
- App Designing (UI/UX)
- Web Development
- Small Business(< $10M)
- Medium Business($10M - $1B)
- Large Business(> $1B)
- Advertising & Marketing
- Business Services
- Financial & Payments
- Healthcare & Medical
- Information Technology
Eight Bit Studios Reviews
A great Team to work with!
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Great with UX and very creative. The apps they have built for me are bullet-proof.
Eight Bit Studios Executive Interview

- Communicate inside and out.
- Navigate conflict.
- Empower work-life balance.
- Provide and carry out a strategy.
- Produce meaningful work.
- Be great partners.
- We shall support a great work/life balance from the onset.
- We shall create a place where people want to work, play, and create every day.
- We shall be truly collaborative, giving everyone a voice with no one team or individual always having the final say.
- We shall treat our clients as partners and friends.
- We shall make things for ourselves because we too are entrepreneurial
- Empathy - It starts with listening. Our partners know their stuff, and we're curious to learn. Million Dollar Round Table - a partner for several years now - said in a testimonial that our team "took the time to learn about our complex organization." We love to hear that. We value different perspectives and want everyone on a project to feel comfortable sharing their opinions. No BS. No agendas. No slick agency lingo. We put people at ease and encourage candor. The software can get messy, and every project has challenges. We can sort through the tough stuff that makes our team great to have in your corner. Flags get raised earlier; problems get solved faster, productivity is higher, and overall quality is greater.
- Camaraderie - Our partners feel our enthusiasm. Tim O'Bryan, CEO & Founder of Rigfish, said: "Eight Bit Studios is always willing to put in extra effort to make a rock-solid product." The more time we spend together, the more mutual trust and the relationship deepen. Our partners know our team—no silos or walled gardens here. Everyone on a project is recognized for their part and feel invested in our partner's success. A sense of shared ownership is key to keeping the team engaged and doing their best.
- Collaboration - We genuinely love cooperation and bringing the best ideas forward, no matter whom they come from. It's authentic. We have assembled a unique pool of talent ready to tackle whatever our partners throw at us. Another Founder we worked with said we are "hugely interactive, hugely supportive, and have a great culture with great people." But just putting talented people in the same office doesn't guarantee good results. We put much thought into creating an environment with the right conditions for collaboration and great work to happen.
We get a lot of repeat work from our partners. We prefer ongoing building relationships. One-off projects happen here and there, but 80% or more of our work is from a consistent client-base.
- Complexity - Complexity can be easily misinterpreted. Even apps that seem simple on paper can have much complexity once you dig in. The more features flow, screens, states, etc, the longer it's going to take to design and develop.
- Security and Accessibility - Apps that have high security and accessibility requirements typically require more rigor in all phases of a project.
- Team makeup - The number of stakeholders and how decisions are significantly made impacts timeline. A small, unified team that is empowered and autonomous will almost always move faster than more substantial teams.
- Number of platforms - Developing for multiple platforms adds complexity.
- Originality - How customized and innovative an app is will impact the timeline. If you're looking to break the status quo, expect a longer timeline.
- Brand development - If you're building an app from scratch, you'll likely need a branding phase in your budget and roadmap.
- Research - Research is invaluable to product design. In the long run, conducting proper research can save time and reduce risk, but it often gets skipped or reduced to jump ahead into design or development. With the right user insights, teams can prioritize features that deliver high value for people, instead of spending time building things people don't need. We believe doing proper research upfront unlocks the empathy required to do the most impactful work.
Let's consider a social media app. The front-end complexity is going to shoot up drastically. Not only are the visual and user experiences usually more robust than those of a standard utility app, but they also need to display much more data in a visually appealing way. Your platforms must also be in parity. If I login to Instagram on my iPad and my iPhone, I expect that liking a post on my iPad will also be reflected on my iPhone. That like will also be visible to everyone else to whom I am connected.
It's a good rule of thumb that native app builds are going to be more complex and take more time to implement than most things implemented on the back-end.
If your market is global, Android tends to lead the pack by being available on a wide variety of lower-cost devices. In this case, it might be advisable to develop the Android app first.
We recommend leading with one platform to shake out all of the design and UX flaws, as well as general functionality and data bugs. Once you have a stable product, it's much easier to use that as a development roadmap for the other platform.
If it's unreasonable to finish one product first, we recommend staggering the product timeline so that one product's development is ahead of the others by several weeks or a dev sprint.
Usually, a development team will have years to update their code to new APIs as older ones are queued up for deprecation. Overall, this creates a stable environment where developers can deliver products with known risks, and product owners can factor those risks into their roadmaps.
More often than not, there is a lower barrier to build out functionality that takes advantage of platform-specific features to create the best user experience. Animations on iOS come to mind. Though some of the hybrid platforms can achieve a higher fidelity now and again, there is just no substitute for native code.
There are many examples of platforms, frameworks, corporate experiments that can be leveraged to get across the finish line quicker or cheaper. There are numerous cross-platform options, some better than others. Most of these options leverage a bridge between their own language or technology and that of the mobile platform. Things can get complicated during implementation. At any point, a company can choose to end-of-life or not support a product, and that can leave you in the lurch. Parse, a database-in-the-cloud comes to mind as an example. Many people jumped on parse because it offered easy ways to stand up a data-based application. Facebook acquired parse and eventually shelved it as a product, forcing many teams to scramble for a solution.
Though native has been our tentpole at Eight Bit, we continually explore other technologies. From where we sit, React Native is very capable. Flutter is also interesting, but we'd like to see it mature a bit before onboarding a client to that platform.