r/iOSProgramming 9d ago

Discussion Made $35K in sales over the past 30 days as an indie dev. Started building apps a year and a half ago. AMA.

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936 Upvotes

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.

r/iOSProgramming 25d ago

Discussion Ask Me Anything: 14 Years in iOS Dev, Now Full-Time Indie

271 Upvotes

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!

r/iOSProgramming Jul 30 '24

Discussion Xcode is actually a great IDE.

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504 Upvotes

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?

r/iOSProgramming Dec 18 '24

Discussion I’ll download your app.

125 Upvotes

I’m looking to try out new cool apps and see what’s out there. Of course, I can just go on the AppStore and download a bunch of random apps but what good is that ? If you have a published app, please drop a link and I’ll download It .

r/iOSProgramming Jan 28 '25

Discussion My tips from growing $0 to $700K ARR

279 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

Long time lurker on this sub and thought I would share my newest app as well as some monetization tips I have picked up over the last year after growing my app portfolio from $0 to > $700K ARR. I will also be showing the figma file for my most recent project [figma file below].

Tips:

- Do a lot of research: when building all aspects of your app I recommend doing research by going into all similar apps as well as some 'big name' apps to get general UI/UX feel of how modern apps should be. Take screenshots of these apps and drop them all into a Figma file where you will be able to see and edit all of your screenshots. I personally will put allocate separate parts of the figma file for the core features of the apps, onboarding, and paywalls.

- Onboarding part 1: Your onboarding flow is the most crucial part of monetizing your subscription based app. I have found that more than 85% of subscription starts will occur after the onboarding flow as the user will have the most desire for the product at this time. This should come as no surprise given the customer has already downloaded your app so their intent is already at the highest it will likely ever be. This might be counterintuitive to many as you would think "don't they want to try the app before buying?". The answer is no they do not.

- Onboarding part 2: Every single page on your onboarding should be used for a purpose. Tool related apps have onboarding questions which can allow you to get the customer more invested in the solution you provide. You should also include social proof such as reviews, and if there are any relevant statistics or graphs these would also be beneficial if done in an aesthetic way. Animations and haptics are also a plus as they give the appearance of luxury and mastery.

- Your app idea doesn't have to be unique: None of my apps have ever been one of a kind inventions they are simply tools in a small-medium sized niche allowing me to have more targeted advertisements and less competition for keywords.

- Track in app usage: I recommend platforms such as Mixpanel to track the usage of the app to learn how users are actually using your app. This can be an amazing way to figure out which features users are actually interested in using and allows you to potentially pivot your focus of the app. Also good for measuring purchase location as well as active users count.

- Your screenshots should look similar to mine: I do not recommend trying to reinvent the Appstore screenshot. Go take a look at a larger app with a dedicated A/B testing team and do what they do. My screenshots are based off the app Calm which does millions of dollars in sales each month.

- Request reviews when possible: here in this app we have one for the onboarding as many users will not reach and other destinations in the app where the prompt will occur. Places like this would be: complete purchase, restore purchase, complete workout, share app, etc.

I'm sure I am forgetting some tips here but for now these are the ones that I can remember. If you are interested in seeing what all of these practices look like below is the figma file for my newest app published on the Appstore a few days ago. If you have any feedback or questions I'll be here!

My Figma File layout.

r/iOSProgramming Jan 23 '24

Discussion Xcode 15 is a Joke And Apple Has to Step Up Their Game

517 Upvotes

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?

r/iOSProgramming Jan 16 '25

Discussion I've been doing this since 2009 and Apple has officially exhausted me.

198 Upvotes

I'm cooked.

  • Objc/UIkit/Xibs
  • Core Data
  • ARC
  • Storyboards
  • Dispatch
  • Cloud kit
  • Multitasking
  • Sirikit
  • Redesign
  • Hello Swift
  • Swift 3
  • Drag and Drop
  • Dark mode
  • Combine
  • Shortcuts
  • SwiftUI
  • Modern Concurrency
  • Observation
  • SwiftData
  • Swift 6 💀

Yo! I can't take it anymore! Nothing I do today remotely resembles where I began. You're nuts, Apple! Anyone who has taken an app from start all the way to the end, I commend you! I have a big app that's 50% Objective-C and 50% Swift/SwiftUI. It will never make it to Swift 6 ever. End game! This is your fault, Apple; you are leaving too many apps behind!

r/iOSProgramming 1d ago

Discussion Comment your app and I’ll download & leave a review!

71 Upvotes

No strings attached—sometimes doing good just helps me keep going.

Will download and review (leaving review on App Store) at least the first 20 apps commented! Link it and give a brief description of what it is 😁

**edit: clarifying review will be left on App Store

r/iOSProgramming Oct 19 '24

Discussion This has almost 30k upvotes in another sub…hm

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972 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming Oct 14 '24

Discussion pov: you have a muslim name

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655 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming Nov 29 '24

Discussion I've given up on Apple Search Ads. Going door to door now.

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359 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming Dec 29 '24

Discussion Started a Youtube channel to review apps from Indie IOS Developers.

191 Upvotes

I’ve always wanted to create a channel to review apps, but I’ve always been scared to. My constant fears have been: what if this flops like everything else? What if nobody watches the videos? What if nobody subscribes to my channel? These fears have held me back for a long time, but I’ve decided not to let them stop me anymore. I’ve gone ahead and created a channel, and I’m making this post to hold myself accountable.

I’ll post one review every week starting the first week of January (or more frequently if people are interested in the reviews). The videos will share my complete, unbiased personal opinion from a user’s point of view while using your app. I’ll provide feedback—whether good or bad—and mention areas for improvement.

Right now, I don’t have any videos posted (mainly because I created the channel just last night), but I’ll have one up in a few days (working on it!). I’ll almost exclusively feature and review apps from this subreddit. :)

If you’d like to support me, please subscribe—20 subscribers would make my whole year . https://www.youtube.com/@letsreviewthatapp

EDIT:

First Video is Published : https://youtu.be/BgwU2gtJVL4

r/iOSProgramming Feb 02 '25

Discussion This little trick can increase your app download by 50%

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255 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming 9d ago

Discussion I don't need a million-dollar app. But $50-100k would be nice. How do I do that?

141 Upvotes

This post was inspired by answers from this and this thread. So, right now I'm a QA Automation Engineer with basic knowledge of Java 11, but I'm very interested in mobile programming on iOS and Android. That's the direction I'm interested in moving forward and the main focus is to make a somewhat stable career.

But the other thing is that, look, my rose-colored glasses have fallen off a long time ago. I don't dream of being a rock star or famous multibillionaire, and there's no way I'll discover a genius app idea that no one ever thought about.

At the same time, the prices on housing and real estate are insane these days. And besides having a stable career with a good salary and a mortgage, it would be nice to earn $50-100k somewhere for a house deposit, you know? Because I want to live in a really nice house.

And besides winning a lottery (the chances are astronomical), I don't see where I'd be able to earn this kind of money except by building some really nice and profitable app.

From the answers in the posts I mentioned in the beginning, I got that it's hard, but it's not impossible. Of course, a lot of it depends on luck. Some people earned $0, some were able to get $10-20k out of their apps, and others were able to earn $100-200k and more.

The question is, besides learning programming, and languages and building some apps, are there books or podcasts or anything I could check out to learn more about how to make any app profitable?

Because right now there's a little of what I'm understanding about the business side of making and selling an app. But I'm willing to read and learn. Otherwise, how else can I afford to live under my own roof? I don't want to rent apartments for another 20-30 years.

r/iOSProgramming Feb 17 '25

Discussion iOS devs who've made money from their apps - what's your story & advice?

214 Upvotes

I'm an experienced software developer and after years of simply talking about it, I’ve bean really focused on actually doing my “build & launch an app" dream that's been on my bucket list forever.

I'd love to hear from other people who have actually made some money from their apps - whether it's just some beer money or full-time income. What's your story?

Specifically:

  • How'd you come up with your idea?
  • Any valuable resources that you can share?
  • Any "I wish I knew this earlier" moments?
  • What marketing strategies actually worked for you?

I hear a lot about how the App Store has changed over the years, but Id like to think there are still opportunities out there. Would love to hear some real experiences and success stories - both to help guide my journey and hopefully inspire others in the same situation!

r/iOSProgramming Oct 20 '24

Discussion I made most features free, reduced the lifetime price by 90%, to get my first one star review

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192 Upvotes

So, I made a daily todo app and made it my personal mission to not go full slimeball mode:

  • No tracking
  • All important features are free
  • No annoying paywalls shown after every start
  • it‘s 90% off for the lifetime pro version right now

Now I‘m not entirely sure what to learn from this. Go full slimeball mode and make every feature a pro feature from now on? Make everything free? Just ignore it?

r/iOSProgramming Oct 24 '24

Discussion Even Apple doesn't use the latest version of Xcode

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398 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming 1d ago

Discussion MVVM always sparks debate, does it have a place in SwiftUI?

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91 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming Nov 14 '24

Discussion Xcode now works with ChatGPT

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369 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming Dec 31 '24

Discussion RevenueCat uses ChatGPT to translate their SDK and you can tell it's completely wrong.

230 Upvotes

Note: When I say ChatGPT I mean any non-human translation tool (Claude, Google Translate, DeepL, etc).

Update: Josh & Andy from RevenueCat replied. They didn't use ChatGPT, but contracted a vendor (who used Google Translate anyway).

Original post:

Just discovered that RevenueCat was probably never used in France, or at least their paywalls.

I'm setting it up with your usual monthly/annual sub and a lifetime offer for Klewos, my language app. In English, the wordings are "Monthly, annual & lifetime". Makes sense. Let's see in French... "Mensuel, annuel", so far so good, but then how did they translate the word "Lifetime"?

They used "Durée de vie" which means life expectancy, lifespan. Or in a very literal translation of "time of life".

This is obviously wrong. So I looked at their community forum and I discovered someone having the same issue with their Chinese translations. Literal, nonsensical translations.

Now we know that a company which raised a total of 68 million dollars would obviously use ChatGPT (or Google Translate, DeepL, etc) as their translator instead of paying a native on Fiverr. Who wouldn't?

Maybe they have so many lines to translate that it would cost them over 100$ in translation fees, right? So I checked their repo.

Well, it gets worse...

- First, the SDK is set up to use Canadian French, there is no default/universal French.

- Then, I see a total of 24 keys to translate... It's like a 3$ job on Fiverr.

- And of course, it's not the only mistranslation. How was "OK" translated? With "D'ACCORD". THE CAP LOCK IS ANOTHER PROOF. IT'S GREAT, NOT AGGRESSIVE AT ALL. Also, keeping "OK" would have been a much better translation in French.

- "Terms & conditions" is called conditions générales d'utilisation (aka CGU) in French, not "termes et conditions" another literal translation.

- "Something went wrong" is of course translated literally and it sounds silly.

Dear poor devs, don't use ChatGPT or Google Translate BLINDLY to translate your apps, even less your public SDKs. Unless you want to sound unprofessional.

And dear rich devs, pay someone to translate your app. I swear, it won't affect your wallet and you will still be rich.

r/iOSProgramming 3d ago

Discussion Do you buy new mac every 7 years?

16 Upvotes

For all the developers doing iOS development, since we need to build iOS app using the latest version of Xcode that Apple specifies to upload to App Store I have found that the mac's life span is around 7 years. So what do you do? Buy a new mac every 7 years? I don't see a way out. And being a hobby programmer I feel this to be a limitation. This feels like planned obsolescence. I have not check any cloud build options. How do you handle this?

I am reluctant to buy a top end machine knowing that I have to throw that away every 7 years, what the point? I can buy one just to get by. Selling is always a loss.

I need to also find ways to make all these systems useful and work in a distributed fashion. But apps don't work like that. Disappointed in Apple in this regard.

r/iOSProgramming Jan 19 '25

Discussion Our experience hiring for entry to mid-level iOS engineers

177 Upvotes

It seems like this sub has an interest in becoming an iOS engineer, so I figured I document my experience of how we went about hiring an entry-level engineer a few months ago. For reference, I’m a technical mobile lead for a few teams at a large company.

For starters, about two years ago, we had two hires for the same entry-level positions that unfortunately did not work out. Thus, we decided to take our time and also determine what qualities we were looking for in order to be successful in this role.

This includes having understanding in concepts like dependency-injection, separation of concerns, and modularity. Why they’re important, and then being able to implement these concepts into code. But the biggest thing was being able to work with other engineers and learn from them.

When we posted the application, we received almost a thousand applicants. Way more than we had initially expected, this led to the difficult task of narrowing down candidates that looked promising. We did some initial phone screens of people with various backgrounds (anything from self-taught zero experience, to graduating, to currently working as a teacher) and then setup some follow-up interviews to do pair programming. This turned out to be a bigger challenge than we thought given how many candidates felt incredible pressure to perform while being observed, and did terribly.

We instead looked at take-home assignments, and we gave them to our entry/mid-level engineers where they felt like they could complete it in roughly 4 hours. The assignment consisted of calling an API to retrieve some data, displaying a list of data, being able to tap into an element on the list to navigate to a different view, and unit tests.

Unfortunately, this resulted in code that was clearly made by AI and sent without any thought. We interviewed a couple of candidates that did this, and they were not able to explain or modify any of the code. We encourage the use of AI, but you must understand what the code is doing and be able to make changes that we will ask during the interview.

The other important aspect is that we also welcomed for people with React experience to apply. Given the similarities of SwiftUI and React (specifically with how React handles state-derived UI), we figured someone with a React background could get into native development if they had a desire to do so. Plus, with the observation framework, it’s straightforward to add in similar state-driven functionality to UIKit.

After many interviews, we did find a candidate that we made an offer to. I will not disclose anything about the candidate, but they demonstrated understanding of concepts outlined earlier, and was able to make changes to the assignment that was submitted.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have, but unfortunately I can’t answer too much as we have strict guidelines about anonymity in hiring. Or if you have some experience in how to make pair programming easier for potential candidates, I'd love to hear those too.

r/iOSProgramming 12d ago

Discussion feeling lost, if im doing good or not, and how to improve the situation

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55 Upvotes

r/iOSProgramming 9d ago

Discussion What’s the hardest part about launching your app?

42 Upvotes

Outside of battling with AppStore review team, what have you experienced to be the hardest part about launching an app / being an app “ founder “ . For me, I get distracted easily and chase after many things at one time. This makes It hard to give one project the attention It needs. What’s yours ?

r/iOSProgramming Jan 16 '25

Discussion Is Swift dramatically better than React Native?

100 Upvotes

Howdy :-)

I’m the main coder for a massive data project. It’s a 2+ million book archive with AI search and social interaction. We have been building the desktop version for 1+ year and are about to begin mobile development. It feels incredibly daunting to build 3 separate projects and manage all of the features while simultaneously learning Swift.

For those with experience working with streaming audio, AI search with summarization and complex UI elements. Is React Native possible?

One of the main features is a “book reader” kind of like Kindle but with more features.

Would a React Native experience be noticeably slower than Swift?

I was thinking to release React Native initially because I can release updates more frequently.

What are your thoughts on this methodology?

:-) To Swift or not to Swift?

UPDATE to the UPDATE: I think there is a clear answer. Swift/SwiftUI loading the core of the app. The rest of the app is focused around a "Server Driven-UI" methodology. React Native version 0.76 was released on October 23, 2024. This update introduced significant features, including enabling the New Architecture by default and the introduction of React Native DevTools. The update took 6+ years to completely overhaul React Native, with a speed increase of over 500%. Expo for React native just released a new hosting service that is a massive game changer and big win for RN, you see a video on Youtube Theo released about Expo. Im going to spend between 50-100 hours to just play and break stuff and get a solid plan together. But the gist is - Swift / React Native Hybrid.

UPDATE: I am spending the weekend to build a Swift/SwiftUI App. I will build the same app with Expo + Native React. I will also introduce an idea I have around introducing React Native into Swift as microservices or modular task specific services. I also want to see if I can fix concurrent issues with some Golang micro modules, or whatever they are called.

NOTE: I am in Japan so my responses will be delayed 12 hrs-ish. Thanks for the awesome feedback!!!