My little startup recently celebrated our first really big and important deal. We're going to be developing the Android version of an already developed iOS app. The company that built the iOS app and the web interface is one of the most popular (and IMHO the best) mobile development firms.

It seems that there there is a little bad blood betweeen the parties that are funding the project and the company the developed the inital apps. Therefore we've had a lot of difficulty in getting documentation, specs, graphics and basically any information regarding the development of the applications. Basically we got the source code for the iOS app and a dump of the Django app that powers the API and web interface.

As you can imagine as a developer with no iOS or Objective-C experience and with very little background information, it's been a frustrating process already. Fortunately the names of the people that developed the app are all over the source code. I've managed to find 3 of them on Twitter.

Do you think it would be appropriate to contact these people to pick their ear and get a better sense of what they're doing? I think it would save me a ton of time. But the relationship between that firm and the funders is making me hestitant to divulge anything.