‘Fixing It Later’ Is The Most Expensive Decision In App Development

Innovation‘Fixing It Later’ Is The Most Expensive Decision In App DevelopmentByDan Haiem,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 27, 2026, 06:30am EDTDan Haiem is the founder and CEO of AppMakers USA, helping business leaders design, build and scale apps that deliver real-world impact. gettyOver the past year, our team has worked through more than 37 apps that came to us because something had gone wrong. Internally, we call this “Fix Your App,” but the work is not routine maintenance. In the majority of those cases, the root cause followed the same pattern: An issue had been identified earlier, pushed aside and treated as something the team could fix later.What begins as a technical shortcut does not stay technical. Over time, it compounds. It affects product decisions, delays growth, increases operating costs and, in some cases, raises legal or compliance questions.Many teams underestimate that part. “Fixing it later” can become one of the most expensive decisions a product team makes.Why The Cost CompoundsTechnical debt rarely stays an engineering problem.Just recently, a client came to us because their onboarding and user data pipeline kept breaking in ways their users could feel. At first, it looked like a feature problem. Once we got deeper, the issue appeared to be in how data moved through the product. Earlier fixes were layered on top of the original problem instead of solving it, so every new change created another side effect.​​That happens more often than founders expect. In our app recovery work, roughly 2 out of every 3 apps we review have some version of this problem, where the visible issue is not the real issue. It is the result of an earlier shortcut that became part of the product.If user data is involved, that same kind of compromise can move from a product headache into a privacy or compli...