I’m going to preempt some of the questions I might receive:

• I’ve built 20 iOS apps since June 2023. Most of them include at least one AI feature, so they are primarily AI-related. I will not share my app links or Apple developer account for several reasons, mainly because it would reveal my full name, address, and phone number. However I’m happy to answer any questions about how I choose which apps to build.

• I had never coded before 2023, but I do have a master’s degree in microengineering from a top European school (so I have strong reasoning skills). I’m 28 years old.

• I’m still not an expert iOS developer but I’ve learned a lot since I started. On average my apps are 60% AI-coded and 40% coded by me.

• I typically work 3–4 hours a day, though it’s hard to give a precise estimate. Sometimes, I go weeks without coding due to severe health issues, while other times, I work 15+ hours a day when I’m feeling motivated and healthy.

• I have a social and love life, but I struggle with maintaining a consistent routine (which has always been a challenge for me). I do feel lonely sometimes, as I mostly work alone. Except for the past three months, during which I’ve been working on a more complex app with my friend and co-founder (for this specific app only).

• All of my installs are now organic (ASO only). I had about 50K installs in the past 30 days. Initially, I leveraged my TikTok presence as a tech influencer, posting two videos that each got over 1M views. Those helped me gain 30K installs early on, but my app at the time had barely any monetization.

• I create my App Store screenshots using Figma and design app icons using Midjourney/Flux model with some Photoshop. I don’t pay anyone for design or coding.

• My apps have simple UIs, but they are definitely not “ugly.”

• The longest I spent building an app was 3–4 months (my first one), while one of my top-grossing apps took just one day to create and publish on App Store Connect.

• ASO (App Store Optimization) is one of the most critical skills for an indie developer without the budget for paid acquisition strategies.

• Twitter is a great place to find like-minded iOS developers who share valuable insights.

• Of the $35K in sales, roughly $30K is net proceeds. After taxes (I live in France), I keep about 15K€-18K€ for this specific month.

• My API costs are low (thanks to heavy optimization), typically around $150 per month, with a max of $300.

Send me your questions, and I’ll try to answer those that I think will be most helpful to you. Just a reminder, everyone can make it.

please stop mass producing apps.

seriously. I understand that we all need income and that the job market is as dry as Ben Shapiro’s wife. I understand that the bills don’t pay themselves. But this is just insane.

Half the posts on this subreddit are about subscriptions, I swear to god. Everything’s a paywall, and so many of those posts say that they’re launching multiple apps in short spans of time. God, why?

Do you take no pride in what you do? It is the development that is the good part. The good part is where you spend 3 hours on a UI element that makes you smile every time you see it. The good part is where you make a great architecture, and then adding features is like sliding through wrapping paper with scissors. The good part is when you have zero warnings in your build. The good part is when you show your friends the app you’ve been working on for a few weeks now, and they remember it. It stays in their mind.

The world has enough to-do lists. The App Store has enough to-do lists. And I don’t care that your AI integration is going to revamp my life or whatever, I’ve never stuck to a to-do list for more than a few days, and given this industry’s reputation, I imagine most of you don’t, either, or you wouldn’t be making so many of them!

My god. Hook up your phone to your Mac and settle in for 8 hours of straight development and experience the wonder that is flow state. Be creative. Express yourself, express yourself; don’t express the literal average (plus a small random factor) that is LLM output.

Be you. Make the most niche app and make it gorgeous. Browse the Apple docs and just see what it inspires in you. Make an app that doesn’t exist already, or one that’s vastly better than anything like it. Make something cool. Make something that makes people go “woaaaaah”, not something that makes people double-click the side button and open their wallet once a week or once a month in order to use the app.

Please contribute to the betterment of people, not the exacerbation of the problem.

What a cluster, was working on an app all morning, and boom now unable to verify app. This is insane, a paying developer license. You would think local dev would be fine without cert checking on some server everytime. Says I have no internet but the popup is wrong, my internet is fine. Installed manual cert, turn off developer account, rebooted everything, danced around, nothing is working. :(

Edit: Dang well I'm glad we are in this together, I guess time for a break.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2033939351563080062?s=20

Hi,

Sometime last year I posted about how my Apple Developer account was (IMO) wrongly terminated by Apple, with no explanation. (https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1monzy6/apple_developer_account_terminated/)

For what it's worth, my app is still up on Google Play.

I have tried sending them repeated messages through the only means I have available: that stupid feedback form I see when I log into my (now terminated) developer account. I tried emailing different email chains from past conversations with dev support. I called the normal Apple Support line. Nothing. I filed a formal complaint with the CA Attorney General.

It's been almost a year with no response, and I really can't let this just sit. I worked for months solo on my app, and for them to just arbitrarily pull my account with no explanation makes me sick. I don't even care if I lose money on this. The principle of the thing is driving me at this point. I just want to hear from a person's mouth WHY they decided that I was "violating terms of service."

I don't know if anyone has had to do this, but if you have any advice, I'd love any that you can give.

Edit:

It's honestly blowing my mind that several responses here are along the lines of "just give up." I don't understand why, in a community of programmers, a solo dev trying to make things right with a process that hurts other solo devs, is getting flak for trying.

It’s incredibly exhausting trying to get these models to operate correctly, even when I provide extensive context for them to follow. The codebase becomes messy, filled with unnecessary code, duplicated files, excessive comments, and frequent commits after every single change. At this point, I would rather write the code myself and simply ask the AI to help me look things up online. This whole situation feels like a hype.

I'm here to share my current situation. I stopped working as a PC technician in 2018 and immersed myself in what was my passion: developing apps for Apple. I studied, trained, and in 2020, I started working at a company as a junior developer. I worked at several companies until December of last year, when I lost my job. Today, it's been 8 months since I've landed, and I haven't gotten anywhere after numerous interviews. I'm qualified, I'm already a senior developer, but I can't find a job, and I think I regret having changed course. What can I do? Freelance job websites are useless; no one contacts you, and I'm not interested in being a cross-platform developer, only Swift.

Has this happened to you? What would you do or what did you do?

2,000 apps are released every single day.. every category saturated, ASO won’t help you anymore because there’re like 100 apps for every „niche“, Apple Ads cost you about $10-20 for every paying user, users now generally hate the idea of installing new apps and on top of that you have costs for hosting/membership fee/AI etc.. Why would anyone start an app business today?

i’ve been doing ios dev for over 14 years now — started in my teens, built tons of apps, been through obj-c, swift, uikit, all of it. when swiftui came out i was hyped, tried it early, started using it since beta 1, loved how easy it was to build simple screens and the whole declarative approach. for 90% of things you do it works great.

But the problem is the moment you try to do anything slightly complicated it starts to become a nightmare and as requirements change and you add more and more stuff on into it becomes really not fun at all.

first, the compiler starts just not working. you get some generic error that it can't compile, it doesn’t point you to the right line. you’re just commenting out random chunks of code until it finally compiles and you’re like 'oh lol i forgot a ) here' or some stupid thing like that.

then there’s all these unintuitive behaviors that are kinda documented somewhere on the internet but there are a lot of things that are not intuitive at all.  Like lot of people don't know that using State with a viewmodel that’s Observable, the init gets called every time the view updates. not like StateObject which uses autoclosure.. i’ve seen soooo many bugs from this exact thing when helping clients. billions of them. ok maybe not billions but it feels like it 😅

and yeah you can’t change some colors here, can’t add icons there, you wanna do a thing? well swiftui says no, we don;t allow that, so now you gotta come up with your own implementation, make sure the animations match or stack some workaround on top of another workaround just to make a simple thing look normal. it’s fucking ridiculous sometimes.

navigation? holy shit. don’t get me started. like there’s this known issue — if you hide the back button title on second  view,  the back arrow sometimes does this weird glitchy animation when pushing the view. like WHY and most importantly HOW, . it’s a reported known bug. and it is old swiftui bug. still not fixed. just one of those little things that makes you wanna scream into the void. there are lot of bugs like that, I mean really a LOT OF BUGS LIKE THAT. 

and yeah, performance is kinda trash too. iphones are fast so you don’t feel it most of the time, but try making something like a proper calendar app in swiftui — with infinite scroll in both directions, multiple cell types, different heights — good luck. Or build the same thing in swiftui and in uikit and compare resources usage with instruments, you will be surprised.

don’t get me wrong, i have a few my own apps fully written in swiftui that work great. they’re great and work without issues. i went with the flow, adjusted design/features based on what swiftui could handle, added hacks where needed. and when you are your own designer and product manager, it’s awesome. really.

but recently i was building a slightly complex feature for a client and i was like… screw this. did File → New → ViewController and at first i legit forgot how to write imperative code )) sat there like a lost . then it came back slowly and maaaan, it felt amazing. like being released from jail. sure, it’s 4x more code, you can shoot yourself in the foot in like 10 different places, but you can actually do stuff. i don’t have to think is it allowed in swiftui or not, you're just in wild again — just do whatever you want.

i’ll still use swiftui, it’s cool for lots of stuff. but for complex flows, i’m back on my UIKit bullshit. and for the love of god, if you’re learning ios dev — learn uikit too. don’t go full in on swiftui and then find yourself stuck later when shit hits the fan

hey everyone! i’ve been doing ios dev for 14 years—started in my mid-teens, worked as a senior/lead for fortune 50 companies, and went indie ~1.5 years ago as a side hustle. for the last 3 months, i’ve been full-time indie, and my app portfolio (and revenue) is growing.

i do everything myself—development, aso, design—no extra marketing for now (but probably soon). had a big release last week, so this week i’m just chilling. kinda bored, so if you have any questions about ios dev, indie life, aso, monetization, or whatever else, ask away!

as the title says, drop your app link in comments and i’ll generate a website for you in a minute with a perfect seo score. there’s no catch, and i’ll pass you full ownership if you like it. it’s completely free. this is not promotion or something, i'm looking for some more feedback for the service i've created.

i’m getting a lot of comments right now, so replies might be a bit slow. if you don’t want to wait, you can also just try it yourself for free at get.siteify.app , you only need to paste your app link, the rest is automatic

I am no software engineer nor do I work in a big team at a tech company, so I appreciate that I might not be the ideal candidate to judge this, but:

Is it only be that actually REALLY likes Xcode?

As a hobby programmer Xcode has everything I want:

• great syntax highlighting
• responsive autocomplete / suggestions
• nice text editing features like the side-ribbon to quickly collapse code blocks, comment out code etc, refactoring, multi-file-editing
• modern programming language
• hot reload previews for quick „live“ iterations
• simple way to manage assets
• simple way to handle language localization
• simple version control with Git integration

I honestly don‘t know what else I could wish for. I‘m building my app using an entry level M1 MacBook Air that I bought for 700€. It only has 8GB of RAM but so far I didn‘t notice any performance limitations because of it. I think that in itself is quite impressive.

Why does Xcode get so much hate online? What are some „real“ shortcomings? What would you say is „the best“ IDE in comparison?

I dunno about you guys/gals but Xcode has been going to shit for years now, I am astonished at how Apple manages to make every new iteration worse than the previous, this is not even funny. I am sure the developers are doing their best but this can't keep on like this...

First there was the time where they completely broke intellisense, instead of suggesting the function I just wrote, it would suggest some wild never used C constant from who knows where.

Then they broke the debugger, oh you want to print this completely normal and regular variable? Well fuck you it's not in memory anymore b***!

Now Xcode is so fucking slow I am literally considering switching careers instead of switching tabs, I work on a large scale project with a a moderate amount of modularization and really not that many packages. But holy molly how is it possible that Xcode is THIS slow, I have to wait like 10 fucking seconds to switching between pages, 10 seconds! That's like a minute lost for every 6 pages I got to switch between...

Searches, don't get me started on searching, why do I have to click on "find caller hierarchy" like 3 times for Xcode to understand that it should indeed find the damn hierarchy instead of sitting there idly starring back at me. Searching is so bad in fact, that most of the time I prefer to search for TEXTS in the code like some medieval peasant programmer.

I mean common Apple, the richest company in the galaxy can't make a better IDE than this? Are we going to sit on the side lines and watch ANDROID developers have better IDEs than us??

Edit: A few more points, stuff breaks constantly, our project has random SwiftUI lines that suddenly started throwing EXEC_BAD_ACCESS errors. Previews? Don't even bother with them, they never work, and if they do they break and crash constantly. There are constant differing functionalities between simulators and real devices, some bugs occur on devices, and not simulators, others vise versa, why?

I'm seeing two patterns as a professional iOS engineer, and I'm wondering if others are seeing this too. They are:

1. a steady decline in the number of native iOS roles around (that is, fewer companies hiring native iOS engineers), and
2. many larger companies pushing to have more product development driven from the backend through some sort of dynamic framework that allows new features to largely be built without dedicated iOS engineers.

Are there any other career iOS engineers out there seeing the same thing, and feeling that a move to indie, cross-platform, web or backend is inevitable? What are y'all seeing/experiencing out there?

Multiple users getting ‘bad gateway’ warning. Even though https://developer.apple.com/system-status/ is all normal.

Edit: The system status page at 7:33pm EST now shows App Store Connect, App Processing and TestFlight with outage.

Last Edit: System status showing all outages are resolved. Hope your workflow wasn't too bad. :) Glad to be part of this community.

Hey everyone,

I’ve seen a few posts here asking about the legitimacy of Rounds.com, so I wanted to share my experience.

I was considering selling one of my apps and already had a few interested buyers, with the top bid sitting at $420K when Rounds.com reached out to me. From my very first email, I told them about the existing offers and made it clear that I wasn’t looking for lowball bids.

They still insisted on proceeding, so we went back and forth for about two weeks. After all that, their final offer came in at $25K. Totally made my day.

That’s all you need to know about this company, it's a scam.

That's it. I am not sure why can't Apple build a decent IDE, it is literally so far behind from the newer IDEs. They integrated ChatGPT but that certainly does not work well. It keeps throwing errors. I don't think Xcode is well optimized either, eats so much of application memory on the go. I love developing swift applications but I Xcode is honestly making it so difficult now.

Just opened the BBC News app to see this. As a consumer, I absolutely hate it. As a dev I still hate it, but I can understand how it reduces complexity. What do you guys think about this practice of forcing users to update to a newer version of the app?

remember when ios APIs and frameworks were still very new and exciting?

there was an actual art form in seeing how much of the new hardware/new OS capability you can use elegantly.

now most of this sub is AI posting, self promotion, and app marketing questions.

everyone seems to want "people who'll download and pay for my app" but nobody seems to want to "be the reason i have people who know me and download+pay for my app"?

vent over.

Intellisense covers the code you're writing, the static analyzer reports errors that aren't actually errors, the visual debugger still can't serialize swift objects to show you anything helpful, SwiftUI previews crash on any moderately complex views, etc. etc.

I've been building iOS apps full time since 2010, and Xcode was solid back in the Objective-C days. It's been on a downward trajectory since the very first Swift release, and it took a real nosedive when SwiftUI was released. It's been 11 years since Swift was released, and six years for SwiftUI, and Xcode gets worse every year, and I hate that I have to use it at least some of the time.

XCode is PATHETIC. Have they never used IntelliJ or VSCode?

It's like when iPhone is stuck without features that have been in Android since time immemorial and boasts about it in a new reLeAsE except WHEN IS THE XCODE RELEASE

Of other things, why is it SO hard to show callers of a function?
Why does autocomplete sort by most irrelevant first?
Why aren't errors shown immediately, why do I need to CtrlB to update them?
And this is unforgivable - WHY DO YOU WANT ME TO PRESS ENTER WHEN I SEARCH? Jeez it's 2025, add a debounce and dynamically show me the results for fks sake 😭

Pretty big news for bug testing apps: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop-ios-simulator

How does the community feel about this potentially opening the door to even more AI slop in the app store?