Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?
80 points by supernov_a on Feb 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 66 comments
hello everyone, hope you are having a good day, my background is CS in university after that worked on some agencies did many things, from back end JAVA EE to android apps, and recently (3 years ago) moved to do React and frontend mainly, I live in Copenhagen and have a decent job and a good pay my question: is it worth it switching to IOS development and do that mainly for the next few years, my motivation is mainly investing more in the exclusive apple ecosystem, looking to expand my area and work in completely different constraints and runtimes

Also if you have a better career idea please suggest it

thank you



In my opinion here are the pros:

- iOS will be around a long time.

- Big brands and startups are basically required to have an app in the App Store if they want to succeed.

- Every year a new version comes out that requires developers to fix bugs and sometimes adopt new technology.

Here are the cons:

- Extremely difficult to build an indie business on iOS given that there is a single distribution channel that you don't control.

- The learning curve is pretty steep.

Here are some other points:

- Good iOS developers are harder to find than good web developers (feels true to me, it might not be).

- You probably won't be on call as an iOS developer (this is important to me, it might not to you).

Developers are paid well across the board. I would pick a technology you enjoy working in and isn't in decline. I believe developers are more likely to succeed if they chase their interest over their salary.


Big brands and startups are basically required to have an app in the App Store if they want to succeed.

I don't think that will continue to be the case for much longer. It's mirroring the web to an extent - for a long time every business needed to have a website, and now more and more don't bother with anything more than a holding page that directs users to a few social media accounts. Brand apps are likely to go the same way, especially as Apple are doubling down on rejecting apps that don't provide useful functionality now.

Having an app for your brand is worthwhile if you have something to say and something for users to do. If you don't it's painfully obvious that the whole effort was a waste of time.


What brand can you name that wouldn’t have something useful you could do with an app?


The Hershey Company.


https://www.hersheys.com/en_us/products/hersheys-milk-chocol...


What's the purpose of linking this? It's chocolate...with an emoji stamped on it. There's no app.


No but it’s obvious there could be.


Nothing valuable, and especially nothing that shouldn't be done with a website.


Just because you don’t personally value something doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Anyway, it’s clear that the issue here is that you simply want apps to go away. Not that they are.


People have been saying this for a decade.


I can promise that they'll be saying this a decade from now too, without much changing.


> - Every year a new version comes out that requires developers to fix bugs and sometimes adopt new technology.

this is a huge bug in the ecosystem from a user perspective as you have to continue paying to keep your software working.


I wish upgrades were easier on the iOS side, but in some instances users are demanding new features. Take for example split screen on the iPad. I takes time to figure out what your interface should look like in different dimensions. I am not sure what Apple could have done about that in advance.

Upgrades on the web take time and resources too. So I don't think this is unique to iOS.


I guess it is a general software problem. Breaking changes in the platform forces developer to put effort into keeping application functioning and that needs to be paid for somehow


> You probably won't be on call as an iOS developer (this is important to me, it might not to you).

Thank you! This was the reason I went back to Android dev after trying web dev for 7-8 months. There were other reasons too.


> Extremely difficult to build an indie business on iOS given that there is a single distribution channel that you don't control.

Would this imply it is easier to build an indie business on Android?


I don't have any direct experience of building a business on Android. Last I heard iOS users spend more money on the App Store than Android users. I think this implies it is harder. I would think they are both pretty difficult probably in the same order of magnitude to each other.


If the walled garden is that bad for indies, indies should do way better on Android, right?


There is significantly more money inside that walled garden. Just a more qualified customer base in terms of willingness to pay.


So: on net, the single distribution channel provides access to paying customers, in turn making it easier—-not harder—-for indies to build a business there.

Which makes it wrong to say iOS’s single distribution channel is bad for indies: it’s actually good for indies.

Unless you claim that walled garden and paying users occurring together is a sheer coincidence.


I strongly echo all of this.


I'd focus on what platform you like working in.

As a backend dev that has built a few mobile apps in Android and iOS, I hated wait for code to build and deploy to mobile phones. I hated trying to track down errors that only happen on certain devices or tweaking the UI for each phone screen. I hated the annual upgrade monkey dance to support the new version of iOS or Android.

If you switch languages or platforms, you may take a pay hit while you ramp up or you might can get lucky and find a company that will pay full price you to learn the tooling.

Typically, there will be an opportunity cost of learning swift instead of getting paid to do what you know. If it takes 200 hours of learning and you earn $50/hr, that will set you back $10k in lost time.

Don't change because of money. Change because you're bored of react.


I developed Android/iOS apps also, and now I'm full stack .Net/C# dev. The amount of jobs out there is insane, many enterprise jobs, where you build apps to support the business. Super laid back, good work/life balance and decent pay. I can't imagine myself going back to mobile dev.


I've been an iOS dev for... 12 years now. And I love it. I'm in a position now where I'm learning Android for the first time. It's Kotlin and I don't hate it. And I'm still trying to learn back end. I can't code my way out of a box using HTML. I guess you'd say I can't code my way out of a <div>

The ecosystem is amazing. I love the tools. Xcode is a joy of an IDE to work with. There's some room to improve, but compared to everything else... it's not even a question. The community is full of people who are full of wonder and excitement.

As a web dev, you probably already know some Ruby and have some familiarity with some build tools that I didn't when I came to iOS dev. That'll help. You won't be exclusive to Apple. You'll be using CocoaPods and Gradle and Bazel and Jenkins and Travis and god only knows what else. On any given day I code in Swift, Objective-C, Ruby, Kotlin, and Groovy.

At the end of the day, remember you'll be doing this 40 to 80 hours a week. Make sure you enjoy it.


Curious how you have handled some of these challenges:

1. What do you do to avoid massive view controllers? I have found that a lot of iOS apps I have worked on end up having the view controller be responsible for doing everything from fetching data from an API to setting the corner radius on some component. This leads to view controllers being really big and not unit tested.

2. Do you do anything to explicitly keep your application state in one place? I find that state in iOS apps ends up being scattered between a data store, singletons and view controllers. This is a lot more cumberesome than something like Redux where state is just in a single store.

3. I am pretty excited about SwiftUI as it addresses a lot of these pain points and brings iOS development into a more modern era similar to React. What is your opinion of SwiftUI? Are you using it on your apps? If so, what have been the challenges of introducing it into existing apps? If not, why not?


1. Don't have massive VCs by not having massive VCs. That sounds unhelpful, but hear me out... You're asking the VC to do too much. Break that sucker down. Have many, many small classes that do small things. Use libraries for stuff. A VC should be a hub to transit data from the user to a model us MVVC, MVP, MVC... I don't care, every architecture has their acolyte.

2. No. Again not helpful. This is a domain specific problem. I will say I'm waging a now multi-decade war against singletons. Dependency injection is the way to go. For Swift checkout Swinject, it really superpowers your testing.

3. Haven't touched it... yet. My primary projects need to ship and my secondary projects haven't hit the point of UI. Won't until later this year. Then I'll deal with SwiftUI. Combine, however, is my new hawtness and I recommend diving into.


The only things I would consider: what do you love to build?

After a lot of web and APIs dev (NodeJS, Go, Rust, VueJS) I'm now building the native apps of my project (https://bloom.sh).

I find mobile development (especially iOS) very frustrating, the ecosystems are really closed and platforms are not focused on empowering developers but growing their profits and closing more and more their walled garden.

The only 2 reasons I've not abandoned mobile development are:

1) Flutter, a fresh air in UI development, whether it be the simplicity, the tools or the ecosystem.

2) the possibility to build offline first apps.


Build?

Most jobs out there are fixing other people shitty code. If the company is mature enough to be making a lot of money, the chances are the code has lots of crap in it.


My perspective on this has evolved quite recently.

I’ve been doing Angular and React apps on the web professionally for six or seven years now, and a few native iOS apps on the side for fun.

Last summer I got a gig doing a React Native app. “No problem; I know React, I know native. Let’s go.”

I kind of hated it. Everything I was doing in React, though familiar and second nature, seemed so DUMB because I knew that Cocoa Touch had better, faster, simpler solutions.

I came out of the experience with the feeling that web apps are profoundly misguided; that we ought to be going back to static sites for the web, and _real_ native for functionality.

I guess my answer is “yes, absolutely, and maybe you should consider ditching web apps altogether.”


I made exactly this transition and don't regret it. Having a native debugger is hugely luxurious, and the Apple developer ecosystem is for the most part, an extremely nice walled garden. The platform is progressive and quick to deprecate legacy features, which keeps things interesting.

In my anecdotal experience however, frontend (React) and backend (Go, Java) devs are in much greater demand broadly across the market, rather than mobile devs.


"switching" give the impression of let go the web. I say "adding".

I work freelance for more than 20+years and have done almost all: Windows Apps, Web Apps, Mobile (iOS, Android), Cloud, nosql, sql, utilities, etc.

Adding an extra to what you have make you stronger. Is a big plus for me to say "I know this and that and that...".

Of course, I have my preferences and strengths, but I can fit in almost any project.


Agreed. It's good to have the skillset required to develop a mobile app in its entirety, including the API layer if one is necessary.


This question echos fifteen years ago. Swap "iOS" for "Flash." People might have said, "Adobe isn't going out of business any time soon." And those people would have been right. Web development on the other hand is as much "a thing" today as it was back then.

Can you make money as an iOS developer? Sure. But the unit economics are not great. iOS apps are usually free. Paid apps usually $0.99. $1.99 is an expensive app. That's retail before Apple takes its cut. On the consulting/contractor/freelancer side, it's probably harder to find iOS clients than web clients. iOS is after the gold rush. Any stable company with deep pockets that wants an iOS app probably already has one.


You can't swap iOS for Flash.

iOS/Android is more similar to the introduction of the Web Browser. It's an entire platform shift that fundamentally changes how people interact with computing, period.


If you only care about the iOS ecosystem, then sure. Swift is great, a lot of great support from Xcode and a bunch of tools around it.

I did the opposite. I moved from native iOS to React Native for iOS only to React Native for iOS and Android.

It is definitely more complicated to do React Native for now, if you need to do anything that touched the native frameworks/hardware, so it definitely helps to have the native experience.

Finally, I would say that if you are into learning more iOS and getting the native feel, go for it, it will be a fun trip. And after a year or two, you can decide if you want to keep going with it, switch back to something else, or go with React Native (or anything else, I just have more experience with it to talk about it).


I have done the same switch recently and I react native has been a lot of fun to learn. Especially knowing native iOS and android it makes rn sooo powerful cuz you can expose whatever you want.


My situation is a bit different: switching from iOS to ML. One thing I could say is that iOS development is a fun experience. I did it for the past 5-6 years of my career and was self-taught. I learned both Objective-C and Swift during my time in that world. Doing iOS development has taught me a lot UI/UX, amongst other things.

Recently, I switch to a role in ML and its been a change in my workflow so far - which is something I expected, but fun nonetheless. I don't get to do UI/UX in the visual sense but now I have to care about design of ML models and deployment so that other front-end clients can use them.

I would say give iOS development a go ahead because you want to!


How did you find changing from one field to another. I've been doing iOS for about 3 years and I'm started to feel like I might be trapped doing iOS forever. I mean I can't imagine a company wanting to hire me in something else given all my workplace experience is iOS.


Not the parent, but as a hiring manager I would guess that you can implement UIs, make API calls, manage client-side data, work with a type system, etc. Those seem like pretty useful skills in modern client-side web development.

If you would want to make a move to backend/full-stack, you might need to pick up skills like databases, queues, caching, building APIs, and DevOps. But good companies are willing to bet that you can pick up new skills on the job if you have some sort of foundation.


My company have been wanting to start an ML team for the last year. While I have been doing my own learning with ML and deep learning, I mentioned to my CTO during my one-on-one that I want to ML for the company and I showed my progress to him with my side projects.

Proving that you can apply your self-taught knowledge and letting them know you can provide value as your time spent in the new field grows, will be more than enough for the company to let you make the switch.


In general, I think that having knowledge of multiple different tech stacks is good. The IT industry is constantly changing and evolving, and learning to evolve and change is good.

Also, you might want to take a look at Flutter. It's a new(ish) cross-platform mobile development framework from Google. It seems to be getting some traction, and allows you to write truly cross-platform mobile apps. There are other cross-platform mobile frameworks (React Native, ...), but Flutter seems to be gaining momentum.

Anyhow, if you are interested in mobile development, give it a try! It's not you are locked into your choice for life...


My advice would be to focus on iOS as a platform, and not as a matter of React vs native vs Swift vs Java. In the end, you could write an equally amazing (or distasteful) app using React as you could using Swift. Where most developers fall short is understanding the capabilities and constraints of iOS; they aim for the greatest common divisor when it comes to functionality.

While a more senior developer could mentor you, once you understand the platform inside-out, you become more of an authority, and that opens you up to amazing possibilities irrespective of what language or framework you're using.


Yes. I switched in 2010 and haven’t regretted it once. More fun, much less framework churn than frontend, and better pay. And if it crashes for some reason, you can switch to something else.

And learn native Swift, not React Native or Flutter or some other fad hybrid approach. It’ll be worth it in the long run.


>And learn native Swift, not React Native or Flutter or some other fad hybrid approach. It’ll be worth it in the long run.

How? Feels to me like I keep seeing recruitment for cross-platform devs more than native devs. And a lot of companies seem interested in pumping out cross-platform apps from a single codebase than developing separate native apps.


>And a lot of companies seem interested in pumping out cross-platform apps from a single codebase than developing separate native apps.

There will always be a need for expert native devs who can build high performance apps. There are things you simply cannot do with crossplatform apps, specifically things like low level OpenGL code and edge ML. Yes there are less of these jobs, but they tend to pay much better and are in heavy demand.


Both OpenGL shader code and on-device ML can be done in React Native. However, you likely won't reach full native performance today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HYnrdKEVMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbcuLfrt8XA https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/image-classification-on-react-nat...

You're right there will always be a very high demand for native engineers to build the underlying bridge code to back these capabilities. As cross-platform tools gain new bridged capabilities and become faster (https://engineering.fb.com/android/hermes/), as they have been slowly, I think the use-cases where using something like React Native or Flutter is possible and makes sense will grow.


A lot of startups are enamored with React Native and Flutter, which is almost the definition of a fad, but virtually all the big tech companies who pay the most are hiring native devs. Even Google and Facebook who created React Native and Flutter still do way more native dev and hire accordingly.


Better pay is imho not true.

Maybe the lower bound might be higher, but from my experience working in FAANG/IB/HedgeFunds the pay for normal SWEs (web frontend+backend, fullstack, whatever you wanna call it) was always higher than iOS devs. (most of the time much higher).


Not my experience. Native mobile dev is a niche, it’s in high demand, and it’s hard to find good people for. The companies who really need these roles pay well for them and I think it’s also easier to get hired for one of these roles as a result.

And I wouldn’t include IB or hedge funds in those numbers, because building internal tools is rarely where the money is.


I did the opposite. Started as native iOS dev for 3 years, then picked up React as a hobby, then started a new job with React-Native, and now I do full-stack. I've also done a lot of back-end both as a hobby and at work.

As others said, play with different tools and do what you enjoy!


Some people are generally good at doing software development and they choose the platform based on how well it pays. iOS is certainly way up there both in terms of demand and pay. If that's what matters to you, switching should give you a bump in pay.


Early last year I made the exact switch you are considering. As another commenter pointed out, since I work as a freelancer it was more a matter of "adding" a skill rather than "switching" I was able to gradually transition to doing native iOS.

Swift itself has made me feel a lot of enjoyment and productivity as a solo developer, I feel I'm able to produce a higher quality of software faster with far less npm noise and "busy work". There is a lot more work in React right now but with that comes a lot more competition and a lot of not very interesting jobs doing repetitive CRUD work. The community is much smaller but very friendly and welcoming to newcomers and beginners. With CoreML, ARKit, SwiftUI and Catalyst it's quite a fun time to be working in Apple's walled garden.

Keep in mind there is a considerable upfront time investment in doing this, there is a lot to learn. Swift itself should come fairly naturally as it's designed in a way that you can get by with a small subset of it and gradually add more. Learning the platform and it's APIs however takes some time.


The mobile "web" is embracing native apps in a big way. It's difficult to go anywhere now without being pestered into installing an app - even if the site already has a perfectly usable mobile version. Worse still, some sites refuse to work at all or are severely limited. I don't particularly like the direction things are going in (despite having very few nice things to say about "modern" web frontend) but if I was in your situation I could certainly see myself going with iOS (or Android) from a salary perspective. Not sure how things are in Europe but I've noticed a lot of tech startups where I am in Tokyo skipping the web entirely in favour of apps.


In my experience, you will excel the most at what you enjoy the most. I would try iOS and see if it something that would excited to work on most days. I doubt good web developers or good mobile developers will be going hungry in the next couple of years.

Have you considered Flutter, at all for native mobile development? Not sure there is any demand for Flutter developers, per se, but since you are looking at mobile development anyway, might be worth a look.


For web:

It's easier to test UI You can choose the language of your preference Easier to be cross-platform For native:

No browser bugs to worry about Easier to just get started (fewer dependencies) Less worry about supporting outdated OSes I have visited INORU https://www.inoru.com/ios-app-development for better iOS development


Like most things, it depends... If you don't hate React, you may want to look into React Native, or Flutter so that you have a decent path to cross platform support. There's also Cordova/PhoneGap if you wanted to dip your toes more slowly.

If you're going all in, you'll probably be okay, but I'm nut sure how broad the audience will be longer term. It feels like the focus is going towards cross-platform (at least iOS + Android) as much as possible. There will always be a need for some custom glue to each respective platform even then though.

iOS isn't going anywhere, but Android is also here to stay, and a huge market share to ignore. Few businesses will fund two separate applications with distinct code bases if they can target both relatively well with a single code base. That's just my $.02


I would cut off my left nut before building anything that depends primarily on either iOS or Android. It's lose-lose - if you get successful, they'll copy you and fuck you over.

Obvious exceptions apply e.g. if you just build a widget as a lifestyle business.


I'd suggest investing in a few months of iOS dev in your spare time to get a feel if you like it before making any commitments.

Understanding the tools and basic architectures and APIs will be useful on your CV.

Doing some React Native might be the way in for you.


I too am a web developer and have constantly been fascinated by new technologies. I had looked at android development but could not get a hang of Java. Recently flutter has been in the wild and so I choose to get my hands dirty by doing flutter challenges. I loved the process and the ease of working with flutter so I ensure that I spend at least 1 hour everyday developing in flutter. I look forward to getting off from work so I can switch on my home laptop and do some flutter. P.S : I will continue being a web developer.


I suggest to take as a hobby and learn more about how mobile os works, Also try android dev. All this task will lead you to better understanding of full stack development. Pick a tech of your choice in Full stack development and revisit skillset every few years. Pro Tip- If you have decent job, do not ruin it for small temptation. First jump into it prove yourself and if possible just find that work in your existing company.


Oooh, interesting. So, people who know: I get the impression that we're moving to a "business that has an app front end" model rather than the app itself being the business. So isn't it "better" to use a cross platform toolkit?


If you have front-end development, the much better move in my opinion would be to master modern back-end development in ruby / elixir / go / etc... and become a true full stack developer. I made the move to iOS 5 years ago and regret it for a few reasons.

1. I became "stuck" doing iOS development. I recently had to switch jobs, and even though I have some server and web experience, it was more scattered and dated than my iOS experience. I was looking for senior software engineer positions and with my track record of iOS development, the only positions that gave me an interview were the iOS ones of which there were a lot less. If I had a history of server work, I have a feeling I would have gotten a lot more interviews even for jobs that didn't use the specific stack my experience was in. At this point, if I want to get back into full stack dev, I would either have to convince my current job to switch teams, or take a cut in seniority and pay.

2. iOS development is behind on modern UI dev concepts. Developing for iOS feels like going back to jQuery or Backbone.js from React. Things like a declarative user interface, automatic DOM re-rendering and UI Bindings are in their infant state in iOS, while they have been core concepts of web frameworks for a decade. As a result, a lot of iOS code out there is very messy. While the web moved towards light user interface components and centralizing business logic in the Redux state, iOS stayed with the MVC pattern which in practice often results in giant, untested view controller files very reminiscent of the big jQuery script files of the early 2000s. You can try to fight this by adding your own architecture and external libraries, but such approaches will always be second class citizens, not the default.

(SwiftUI is going to address some of these issues. However, its a newer technology and most existing iOS apps will be slow to adapt to it)

3. It will be harder to pass a FAANG interview. One of the crucial interviews is the "system design" interview which is almost always server related. As opposed to the algorithm questions which are easy to study for from a book, the only good way to answer these system design questions well is by having experience in designing and building such systems. If you stay on the client side doing iOS or front end, you won't be able to answer such a question effectively.

The reason I moved to iOS from front end was because I wanted to get outside of the browser to a more full feature platform. In retrospect though, the obvious platform to transition to is not iOS or mobile dev, its the server. The server is a full feature platform which gives you the ultimate freedom to do whatever you want. And while frameworks like Ruby on Rails or React come and go, I found that job openings were pretty indifferent between the specific framework you worked on as long as you have server experience in general.


React Native and then you don't have to :D


nope. iOS market reach is limited, as you're likely to reach more potential customers via web. Yeah the mobile ecosystem is trendy, but looking at numbers the apps that make money are games. which you can make via some platform agnostic engine such as Unreal | Unity etc.


Very risky to be a developer for a walked garden.

If Apple does Apple things, they might make it harder and more expensive to develop. You might be a great programmer, but your company may not want to build native iOS apps.


The only thing native really gives you is notifications and performance (and better sensor access) at the cost of high coupling and having to use a specific OS for development.

Church-Turing yadda yadda




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: