Smile MEDIA Reviews

About Smile MEDIA

SMILE media is a website design, software development, and digital marketing agency aimed at improving business performance through technology efficiencies and analytics. They will help you sell your products and services online, using a secure and reliable platform, all while looking great on any device. They start by understanding their client’s business objectives, aspirations, audience behaviors, and needs.

Services

Mobile App Development Web Development VR App Development AR App Development Enterprise App Modernization Chat Bots & AI Development Ethereum Blockchain

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A mobile app our customers downloaded and never deleted

Khalid Al-Mansoori / Chief Digital Officer - Emirates Digital Group

Verified
Jul 15, 2025

Project summary: Our existing platform had grown organically over several years and the accumulated technical debt was beginning to affect both performance and our ability to ship new features.

Project governance was one of the things that impressed me most. We had a dedicated project manager who ran tight fortnightly sprints with clear acceptance criteria, a shared backlog that gave us full visibility at all times, and a change request process that was fair and transparent. Nothing slipped through the cracks, no bill shock at the end, and the final delivery matched the original scope document almost perfectly. In my experience that kind of discipline is genuinely uncommon.

PROS

Senior engineers on our account throughout the entire project rather than a bait-and-switch to juniors after contract signing, transparent reporting, realistic estimates that proved accurate

CONS

Premium pricing compared to some of the alternatives we evaluated, but the quality of the output and the absence of rework costs made the investment straightforward to justify

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeMobile App Development

IndustryMining & Metals

Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999

DurationJun 2025 – Oct 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

I lead technology at Emirates Digital Group, a mid-sized organisation in the Mining & Metals sector headquartered in Dubai, UAE. My remit as Chief Digital Officer covers everything from infrastructure to product development. We had reached a point where our internal engineering capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap without an experienced external partner.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Growth into new markets had exposed serious limitations in our platform. What had worked for our original user base in Dubai, UAE was not going to scale internationally, and the Mobile App Development requirements for those new markets were meaningfully different. We needed a partner who had solved that kind of problem before.

What services did the company provide for your project?

End-to-end Mobile App Development delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Mining & Metals infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Mobile App Development engagement in the Mining & Metals space. That peer's experience had been excellent and their project profile was similar enough to ours that the recommendation carried real weight. Everything we found during our own evaluation reinforced that this was the right decision.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Dubai, UAE and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new Mobile App Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Mining & Metals business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The intellectual honesty. They told us when something we wanted was a bad idea and explained why. They told us when a timeline was tight and gave us options. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear in order to win work or avoid a difficult conversation. In a long engagement that kind of relationship is far more valuable than an agency that just says yes.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.

Data engineering work that turned years of unstructured records into actionable insight

Jisoo Kwon / CTO - HanRiver Tech Co Ltd

Verified
Feb 28, 2023

Project summary: Inter-agency data sharing had become a bottleneck and we needed a secure, auditable integration platform that met government security classification requirements.

Twelve weeks from kickoff to live production deployment for a project of this complexity. I would not have believed that was achievable if I had not watched them do it. The velocity came from genuine engineering discipline — clear requirements, short feedback loops, automated testing, and a team that communicated internally without the overhead that slows most agencies down. The product has been live for four months with no critical bugs and one minor patch. We are already in scoping conversations for phase two.

PROS

Technical depth across the full stack, honest and timely communication, delivered exactly what was scoped without surprise additions to the invoice

CONS

We underestimated the internal resource commitment required on our side during discovery — the team warned us, we did not listen fully, and the first sprint was slower as a result

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeData & Analytics

IndustryGovernment & Public Sector

Project Cost$50,000 to $149,999

DurationOct 2025 – Nov 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

HanRiver Tech Co Ltd is a Government & Public Sector business based in Seoul, South Korea. As CTO I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

The immediate trigger was a performance failure during our peak trading period that cost us measurably in both revenue and client trust. The root cause was architectural and our internal team did not have the Data & Analytics expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Data & Analytics but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

Honestly, the quality of the questions they asked during the briefing process set them apart. Most vendors listen to the brief and come back with a solution to exactly what you described. This team came back with a solution to what we actually needed, which turned out to be somewhat different. That kind of consultative instinct is what we were looking for.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Communication was handled primarily asynchronously given the time zone difference between Seoul, South Korea and the team's base, but it was managed so well that the gap rarely felt like a constraint. Written updates were clear and timely, escalations were handled promptly, and we never had to chase for a status update. The cadence was exactly right — enough to feel informed, not so much that it created overhead.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

We went live three months ago. In that time we have not had a single P1 incident, our page performance scores have improved across every measure, and the feature we had deprioritised for years because the old architecture made it too complex to implement is now in our next sprint. The platform they built has opened up our roadmap in a way we had not anticipated.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The intellectual honesty. They told us when something we wanted was a bad idea and explained why. They told us when a timeline was tight and gave us options. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear in order to win work or avoid a difficult conversation. In a long engagement that kind of relationship is far more valuable than an agency that just says yes.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Unreservedly. We are in active conversation about the next phase of work and I expect this to become a multi-year partnership. For any organisation in the Government & Public Sector space looking for a Data & Analytics partner who combines technical rigour with genuine commercial awareness, I would put this team at the top of the shortlist.

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