Technical Depth in IoT Software Development
The IoT Software Stack
A production IoT system involves multiple software layers working together: the companion mobile app that end users interact with, the communication layer that bridges the device and the cloud, the backend services that process telemetry and manage device state, and the update infrastructure that keeps firmware current in the field. Each layer has its own constraints and failure modes, and the system only works well when all of them are designed in concert.
We take a protocol-agnostic approach to the communication layer. Whether your hardware team has chosen MQTT, BLE, WiFi direct, or a combination, we design the software integration to handle the specifics of that protocol while keeping the rest of the stack decoupled. This means swapping or adding communication channels later does not require rewriting the app or the backend.
Companion App Development
The companion app is the primary interface between your customer and your device. It needs to handle device discovery and pairing, real-time status monitoring, sending commands, configuring settings, managing user accounts, and displaying historical data. It also needs to work gracefully when the device is offline or the connection drops mid-operation.
We build companion apps using Kotlin Multiplatform, which lets us share business logic, networking, and state management across iOS and Android from a single codebase. The UI layer is native to each platform, delivering the responsiveness and platform-specific behavior that users expect. Our open-source framework KiteUI accelerates the UI development, while Lightning Server provides a typed backend that keeps the app and server in sync automatically.
For BLE-connected devices, we implement robust pairing flows with clear user feedback, automatic reconnection logic, and background communication where the platform allows it. For WiFi-connected devices, we handle provisioning flows that walk users through connecting the device to their home network — one of the most error-prone steps in IoT product setup.
Cloud Backend and Device Management
The cloud backend is the central nervous system of an IoT product. It receives telemetry data from devices, stores and processes that data, routes commands from the app to the correct device, manages device registrations and ownership, and serves as the source of truth for firmware versions and configuration.
We deploy IoT backends on AWS using managed services that scale with your fleet: API Gateway and Lambda for serverless compute, DynamoDB or RDS for data storage, IoT Core for MQTT device communication, S3 for firmware binary storage, and CloudWatch for monitoring and alerting. This architecture handles thousands of concurrent device connections without requiring you to manage servers or predict capacity.
Device management features we implement include fleet dashboards for monitoring device health and status, device grouping and segmentation for targeted updates, telemetry aggregation and analytics, remote configuration pushing, and alerting for devices that go offline or report errors.
OTA Firmware Update Infrastructure
The ability to update device firmware over the air is critical for any IoT product. It lets you fix bugs, patch security vulnerabilities, add features, and improve performance without requiring customers to return or manually reflash their devices. But OTA updates also carry risk — a bad update can brick devices in the field.
We build OTA update systems with safety and reliability as primary design goals. Our implementations include firmware version management with clear upgrade paths, staged rollouts that push updates to a small percentage of devices first, automatic rollback when an update fails to apply, integrity verification using checksums and code signing, progress tracking and retry logic for interrupted transfers, and reporting so you know exactly which devices are running which firmware version. We built exactly this kind of OTA infrastructure for Blackstone Products' WiFi-enabled grills, ensuring that firmware updates could be delivered reliably to devices already in customers' homes.
Security in IoT
IoT systems present a larger attack surface than traditional web or mobile applications. Devices operate in untrusted physical environments, communication happens over potentially insecure networks, and a compromised device can serve as an entry point to your cloud infrastructure.
We address IoT security at every layer. Device-to-cloud communication is encrypted using HTTPS/TLS and authenticated using per-device certificates or tokens. Firmware updates are signed so devices can verify authenticity before applying them. The companion app uses HTTPS for all server communication and secure storage for credentials where the project requires it. Backend APIs enforce authentication and authorization on every request, and device permissions are scoped so that one user cannot control another user's devices. We follow the principle of least privilege throughout the system.