The full story.

About

Nativity Labs' founder, Don Angelillo, wrote his first lines of code at eight years old. He has been a professional software engineer since 1997, nearly three decades of building things for screens of every size. The technologies have changed completely over that time. The thing underneath them has not: systems that talk to each other across a network.

As a junior developer, he helped build About.com largely from the ground up: backend work and light frontend, the kind of foundational work that teaches you how real systems behave at scale. That grounding never went away. It is the foundation everything since has been built on.

From there, the work expanded steadily into the frontend, increasingly rich Flash experiences for major consumer brands, all of it backed by serious server-side work. He led PHP/MySQL teams, architected and ran LAMP production environments, and set development and deployment standards for Fortune 500 clients. After years of CRUD operations and form submissions, building things people could actually see and touch was a revelation. The pattern that would define everything after was already there: a rich client on top, real systems work underneath.

Then Apple announced the iPhone SDK in 2008. "This is it. Star Trek in your pocket. This is what I've been waiting for. Let's go." The same impulse that made Flash exciting, building rich interactive experiences that people hold in their hands, found a permanent home on a platform that wasn't going anywhere. Native mobile became the focus for the better part of two decades.

The work earned its keep: apps featured as App of the Day in the US App Store multiple times, and an invitation to Apple's Cupertino lab to build one of the very first Apple Watch apps on pre-release hardware.

He has shipped through every platform shift Apple has thrown at developers: manual memory management to ARC, Objective-C to Swift, UIKit to SwiftUI, the original SDK through Liquid Glass. The surface kept changing. The systems thinking underneath stayed constant, because an engineer who has worked both sides of the request builds better software on either side.

That is what Nativity Labs exists to do: put that experience to work directly. Clients get an engineer who has built real systems for nearly thirty years and is now applying that same craft to AI-enabled products. He can plug into your team and ship to spec. He will also tell you when a feature isn't feasible as drawn and what to build instead, where the user experience falls short, and where a little more polish would make the whole thing better. That is the difference between hiring someone to build it and hiring someone who makes it better.

Notable Work

Native Mobile

  • What to Expect, South Beach Diet, Jillian Michaels Slim-Down Solution, and Calorie Counter, for Everyday Health
  • Newsela Student
  • PGA TOUR, the official app
  • Fanatics Sportsbook
  • Caesars Sportsbook
  • Wellth Rewards
  • Happier Meditation, the app Apple pays to include in its enterprise wellness program
  • Heavy Headlines, the longest running and most popular heavy metal news app on the App Store, 4.8 stars across 1,100+ reviews

Web & Backend

  • The world's first heavy metal band recommendation engine
  • American Express
  • JetBlue
  • HSBC
  • Johnson & Johnson
  • GM
  • Verizon
  • Honeywell
  • Royal Caribbean
  • Diageo (Tanqueray, Johnnie Walker, Crown Royal, CĂ®roc, Bulleit)
  • Cadbury (Stride Gum, Trident)
  • The Guggenheim
  • About.com

AI Systems

  • On-device natural language search
  • Agentic content pipelines for classification, transformation, and publishing
  • An agentic job-discovery system that sources and ranks opportunities across the market using LLM-driven relevance scoring