The full story.

About

Nativity Mobile's founder, Don Angelillo, wrote his first lines of code at eight years old. He's been a professional software engineer since 1997 - nearly three decades of building things for screens of every size.

The early years were backend-heavy. As a junior developer, he helped build About.com largely from the ground up - server-side architecture, light frontend, the kind of foundational work that teaches you how real systems behave at scale.

From there, the work shifted to major consumer brands. Tanqueray, Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, and other Diageo properties. Then advertising and campaign work for JetBlue, Royal Caribbean, Stride Gum, and Trident. Each engagement pushed further toward the frontend - increasingly rich Flash experiences backed by serious server-side architecture. After years of CRUD operations and form submissions, building things people could actually see and interact with was a revelation.

Then Apple announced the iPhone SDK in 2008, and everything changed. "This is it. Star Trek in your pocket. This is what I've been waiting for. Let's go." That was the end of everything else. The same impulse that made Flash exciting - building rich, interactive experiences that people hold in their hands - found its real home on a platform that wasn't going anywhere.

Native mobile development became the main focus, and it has been ever since. The apps have ranged from small utilities to products with hundreds of thousands of daily active users. A sampling:

  • What to Expect | Pregnancy and Baby, South Beach Diet, Jillian Michaels Slim-Down Solution, and Calorie Counter - for Everyday Health
  • Newsela Student - for Newsela
  • PGA TOUR - the official app
  • Fanatics Sportsbook
  • Caesars Sportsbook
  • Wellth Rewards
  • Happier Meditation - the app Apple pays to include in their enterprise wellness program
  • Heavy Headlines - a personal project for heavy metal fans who need a news app

Nearly three decades of professional experience, with almost two of them spent exclusively on Apple's platforms - through every major shift the platform has seen. Manual memory management to ARC. Objective-C to Swift. UIKit to SwiftUI. The original SDK through Liquid Glass. Shipping through all of it, and all the while putting that backend background to work building the server-side APIs that power those apps - because an engineer who has worked both sides of the request builds better software on either side.

Nativity Mobile exists to put that experience to work directly. Clients don't just get a developer who writes clean Swift. They get an engineer who knows Apple's review guidelines cold, who can navigate the App Store's arcane submission and distribution rules, who crafts interfaces that follow the Human Interface Guidelines because he's been reading every revision since the first one. Someone who can plug into your team and ship production code, but who can also tell you why your navigation model is wrong before your users do. A principal engineer you can lean on for the full picture, not just the implementation.