Taking over a build

Your developer has gone quiet. What now?

Last updated 7 October 2026

This page exists because the advice that currently comes up for it is American, Australian, or a forum thread from 2021. The order below is the part that matters: people usually start with the lawyer and finish with the accounts, and that is backwards.

First, secure the accounts. Before you say anything.

The instinct is to send a firm email. Do that second. Someone who has stopped replying may still hold the keys to things you cannot rebuild, and an email that reads like the start of a dispute is sometimes the moment those keys go away.

Five things, in this order:

If you have access to any of these, take a copy of everything now — clone the repository, export the database, download the signing certificates. If you do not have access, that is the single most useful thing to ask for, and it is a much easier ask than a refund.

The one that catches everyone

The Android upload key. It is a file with a password, it usually lives on one laptop, and without it you cannot ship an update to your existing users — you ship a new app, with none of them. Google Play App Signing makes this recoverable if it was enabled. Find out which case you are in before you need to know.

Second, find out whether you own it

Most people assume that paying for software means owning it. Under UK law that is usually wrong, and it is wrong in a way that matters here.

Section 11(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 says: the author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it. Section 11(2) hands copyright to the employer instead — but only for a work made by an employee in the course of his employment. A freelancer or an agency is not your employee. And section 90(3) is blunt about the only thing that moves it: an assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor.

A computer program is a literary work for these purposes, under section 3(1)(b). So the default position on a typical UK app build is that the developer owns the copyright and you have, at best, an implied licence to use it.

Go and read your contract for an assignment clause. If there is one, your position is strong and you should say so early. If there is not, you are negotiating rather than demanding, and knowing which of those you are doing before you start is worth a great deal. It is also the reason to settle this in writing as part of any handover, however informal the rest of it is.

Third, find out what you actually have

This is the part nobody can tell you from the outside, and it is the part that decides the cost. Six questions, each answerable in minutes by someone who knows what they are looking at:

• Does it build from a clean checkout? If a fresh clone will not compile without undocumented steps that live in someone's head, every estimate goes up.
• Are there tests, and do they pass? Not a quality judgement. A test suite is how a new developer changes anything without breaking something invisible.
• What does the commit history look like? Steady work, or three large dumps the week before each invoice. The second pattern usually means the code was written in a rush against a payment date.
• Do the dependencies still resolve? An abandoned project rots. Packages pinned to versions that no longer exist can take days to unpick.
• Are the secrets in the repository? API keys committed to git means rotating every one of them, and sometimes a security problem you have already had.
• Is there any written-down knowledge at all? A README that says how to deploy is worth more than it sounds.

Finish it, or start again?

The honest answer is that taking over someone else's half-built app is often more expensive than building it fresh, and nobody selling rescue work likes saying so. You pay for a discovery period that produces nothing visible, you inherit decisions you would not have made, and you carry the risk of what has not surfaced yet.

Rough rule, and it is a rule of thumb rather than a measurement: if more than about half the existing work needs reworking, a rebuild is usually cheaper and always faster. Below that, finishing wins. The only way to know which side of the line you are on is to look, which is why a short paid audit is the right first purchase rather than a full quote.

What it costs to find out

An audit of the kind described above is one to three days of work depending on the size of the thing, so somewhere between £500 and £1,600 at that rate. It is the cheapest decision you will make on this project, because it converts a guess into a number.

What it should produce: whether it builds, what state the code is in, what is missing to reach something shippable, a finish-versus-rebuild recommendation with reasons, and a range for each path. If someone offers you a fixed quote to finish an app they have not opened, that number is guesswork with a margin on top.

Last, the legal route — and what it is worth

Worth being realistic. If the developer was a limited company that has since been dissolved, there is often nothing to recover from. If they are overseas, enforcement costs more than the work did. If they are a UK sole trader who has simply gone under and stopped coping, a demand letter sometimes produces the handover you actually wanted, which is usually access rather than money.

What is almost always worth doing, whatever else you decide: get the assignment of copyright in writing and signed, even as part of an otherwise amicable parting. It costs them nothing and it closes the question permanently. This is general information rather than legal advice — if real money is at stake, a solicitor is a better investment than a blog post.

Sources. Copyright: CDPA 1988 s.11, s.90 and s.3(1)(b), quoted from legislation.gov.uk, retrieved 7 October 2026. Day rates: ITJobsWatch, contract software developer, six months to 6 October 2026. Audit cost ranges and the half-the-work rule of thumb are my own, from doing this work, not published figures. Nothing here is legal advice.