Who Owns Your App When the Project Ends?

A business pays for a website or an app, is happy with it, and a year later wants a change. The developer has moved on, is unreachable, or wants more than the change is worth. And it turns out the domain is registered to them, the code is in their account, and the app listing sits under their developer profile.

At that point the options are bad: track down someone who does not want to be found, or pay to rebuild something that already exists. This is rarely anyone setting out to trap a client. It usually happens because everything gets set up in whichever account was convenient on day one, and it does not get revisited.

Who this is for

Anyone about to hire a developer, agency or freelancer for the first time — and anyone who already has, and has never actually checked. If that is you, the checklist below is worth ten minutes.

The five things that must be yours

1. The domain name

The single most important one. Your domain is your address; if someone else holds the registration, they control where your customers land and what happens to your email. Register it yourself, with your own account and your own card, before the project starts. It takes ten minutes and it is the cheapest insurance in the whole process.

2. The source code

The repository should end up in an account you control, with the full history rather than a zip file dropped into your inbox at the end. History matters more than it sounds: the next developer can see how the thing evolved instead of guessing, which is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight when something needs changing.

3. Hosting

Whatever the site or app runs on should be billed to you and logged into by you. If your developer is paying for hosting and adding it to an invoice, you have a dependency you did not agree to.

4. The backend and database

This one is missed most often. A Firebase project, a database, a storage bucket — these hold your actual data, which is usually worth far more than the code. The project should be under your account with billing attached to you, and your developer added as a collaborator rather than the other way round.

5. The app store accounts

For a mobile app, the Play Console and Apple Developer accounts should be registered to your business, with their own registration fees paid by you. Publishing under a developer's account happens, and it is a serious trap — your listing, your reviews and your install base end up inside someone else's profile, and moving an app between accounts afterwards is painful in a way that moving a website is not.

The handover checklist

Run this before the final payment, not after. A developer who has done the job properly will find it quick to satisfy.

1. 01Log in to every account yourself. Not a screenshot, not a promise — you, logging in, while the project is still live.
2. 02Confirm the domain registration shows your name and note the renewal date in your calendar.
3. 03Check the repository is in your account with full history, and that you can see the commits.
4. 04Confirm billing on hosting and backend is attached to your payment method.
5. 05For an app, sign in to the store consoles and confirm the listing sits under your organisation.
6. 06Get something written down covering how to deploy a change, where things live, and what depends on what. It does not need to be long. It needs to exist.
7. 07Remove access you no longer need once the engagement genuinely ends.

What good looks like from the other side

For what it is worth, this is how I work: repositories, hosting, Firebase projects, store listings and domains are created under your ownership or transferred at handover, and you get a walkthrough of how to run it. Nothing stays locked to me, and you are free to take the project to someone else at any point. I would rather be kept because the work is good than because leaving is expensive. More on how I run projects is on the about page.

Ask any developer you are considering the same question before you pay a deposit. The answer tells you a great deal — not just about ownership, but about how the rest of the engagement is likely to go.

If you are already locked in

It is usually recoverable, and worth doing calmly rather than as an argument. Ask politely and specifically: transfer the domain, add me as owner on the repository, move billing to my card. Often that is all it takes. If you cannot reach them at all, domain registrars and platform providers have dispute processes, and proof of payment plus business documentation goes a long way.

The one genuinely hard case is a mobile app published under someone else's developer account. Plan for that to be slow, and start on it before you need it urgently.