Ask HN: Bad time to start iOS/Swift development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Bad time to start iOS/Swift development?

16 pointsjamil711 comments

I've spent a long time doing fullstack web development, with the last five years focusing a lot on React / Node / Python. While I've enjoyed it I've become a little burned out on the web and it's direction in general, especially javascript. I'd like to try out something different.

I recently picked up swift in my spare time and have built several small apps with it for iOS and macOS. I've enjoyed the experience a lot, especially the language itself and would like to pursue it further. If I wanted to pick up some freelance work to test the waters, whats the market like? is it better to offer something cross platform like RN or Flutter? or is it a reasonable strategy to go narrow and focus purely on swift and it's associated frameworks?.

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Mobile wasn't that hot in 2010, then in 2013 it reached its pick (companies shifting their entire businesses to mobile). Finally, in 2018 it slowed down by a lot. We've noticed a similar trend with AI lately. AI is at its pick right now. Today, companies have dedicated mobile teams that are fairly independent from the rest. They aren't connected directly to the business of a company but they still have a huge impact for sure. You'd be surprised to learn that 80% of the traffic of company X comes from mobile and that mobile team has only 10 folks in it... Very lean, versus 100 folks working on Web and infrastructure.

If you switch today it's fine, you'll get a lot of opportunities as an iOS dev assuming you're really good at it. The bar is higher than Web, usually iOS devs know their stuff pretty well and ask tricky questions. If you've only built little apps, you may have to study a lot more (more advanced topics) before applying to jobs.

If you're looking for freelance jobs only, you'll be fine as long as you're not working with technical people. You can still hack your way around and build apps that aren't really optimized. As long as it does the job.

Thanks for the detailed answer, regarding the downturn in interested I guess I figured as much. It seems that it's focus has shifted to extending and supporting established products rather than being a flagship platform in itself. On the other hand the web market is absolutely saturated right now, my gut feeling was that while mobile has slowed down, it's not going away completely and there might be a viable niche there to work on while everyone's attention is so focused on web.

While there is some work for iOS/Swift-only dev, most of it doesn't occur in a vacuum.

The itch the market really wants scratched is a one-stop-shop where they can get both mobile, web, and support services at once. Consider pitching your services that way. The contracts are bigger in scope and longer-term (because there's more to do, more moving parts, and fewer people to share it with).

The number of people who can do full-stack web, plus iOS, with experience in both, is a small minority of both communities.

Throw in Android and server/devOps and the set gets even smaller.

Throw in experience in what's hot right now, AI and ML, and you're in purple squirrel territory. While people are always looking for that purple squirrel, they don't always pay as well as companies looking for specialists in just a subset of that menagerie.

This makes sense thanks, so offering a wider array of services is potentially a better strategy, given my background and experience. I imagine being able to build the API/backend layer, web and mobile client is desirable to some and you're right in that it would give one longer running contracts with a lot more work. So to reiterate your points, study more mobile, leverage existing skillset and throw in some AI/ML. I guess this is the broad vs narrow topic. How important is it to have finished apps in the respective app stores? I have years worth of web work to display, most of it still in production but nothing concrete for mobile.

I’ve been in mobile development for a long time. I do iOS and swift now.

I think it’s a good market. There are a number of places that do native development. I have always bet against cross platform mobile solutions. It doesn’t interest me as a developer, and I don’t think it’s a good experience for the user.

Thanks for the feedback!

Why focus on some niche environment provided by a specific company according to their whims and needs when there is a vast body of languages, tools, libraries, and frameworks available in the free and open space? With the Internet dominating all applications are basically just stores of data with their related organization, logic, and interfaces. If you want to add a pretty face to such an app using languages, tools, libraries, and frameworks primarily developed and owned by a company you can do that with minimal risk as long as the core is outside that.

It's a fair point and something I think about. For what it's worth I feel exploiting a development niche is a reasonable strategy and the core language is open source. What would you pick if you wanted to change directions?.

There is still a big market for native iOS apps, especially to connect to web applications.

Even smaller companies are interested in an iOS and Android apps for their web application.

So I expect there are lots of freelance opportunities.

But smaller companies also want to save money and think RN is good enough.

I actually learned RN, developed two apps in it, and kinda hate it, but like the idea of delivering the same app on both platforms, of course. Which I didn't do yet, because we don't have Macs at my work (previous work, got fired friday).

Sorry to hear you got fired, good luck finding a new gig. I guess RN or Flutter make sense if you're building for both, I'm not totally against it I just like the idea of using the tools the platform gives you. But I admit it might not be the most practical approach.

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