Code samples don’t tell the full story

When you’ve inherited a mess of an app, and your backlog is growing faster than your team can fix it, bringing in outside help can be a smart move. But here’s where we often see things fall apart: a single snippet of code is shared with an agency, in the hope it will be enough to move the work forward. It isn’t.

A broken app can’t be fixed with a partial view.

A code sample might show surface-level problems: bad logic, outdated syntax, maybe a rogue dependency or two, but it rarely shows what’s really going on underneath. Legacy apps are layered, interlinked and, more often than not, undocumented. Without full visibility, even the best devs are guessing.

We’ve seen this play out time and again. A sample looks fine in isolation, but once we dig into the live app, we uncover completely different problems. It’s like diagnosing a problem with your car from a photo of the steering wheel.

When an app is already fragile, the last thing you want is more guesswork. Code sampling may feel like a quick route to diagnosis, but it makes it easy to overlook critical faults, especially if those faults are buried in less visible areas of the system. You might end up solving the wrong problem, or worse, breaking something else in the process.

For apps dealing with sensitive data, regulated industries or external dependencies, that risk is real. We’ve seen apps pulled from stores, crash out under pressure or even corrupt core data, all because early assumptions were made without proper analysis.

At Indiespring, we don’t start work without a full audit. Not because we’re trying to slow things down, but because it’s the only way to move forward responsibly.

Our audit reviews the live app, the codebase, the architecture and the dependencies. It uncovers the issues that code samples can’t show, from technical debt to performance bottlenecks. Then, we provide an honest report and a set of options. Fix, rebuild, or something in between.

We don’t waste time, and we don’t suggest overhauls when we don’t need to (we always push code recovery before a full app rewrite). But, we do insist on knowing what we’re working with. In brownfield development, assumptions are expensive.

If you’re considering outside support for a struggling app, start with clarity. Book an audit with us and get the full picture, before you commit to fixes.

Let’s take a look