Understanding & Hiring iOS Developers
What is an iOS Developer?
An iOS developer builds applications for mobile devices on Apple's iOS operating system.
What skills are required to be an iOS Developer?
iOS developers need to know the Objective C and/or Swift programming languages, as well as the various frameworks and libraries for hooking into features of the iOS operating system. Some developers may be using other frameworks, like React Native, that allow writing parts of an iOS application in Javascript and make it much more similar to front-end web development.
iOS Developer archetypes
iOS Product Engineer
Archetype
This is a mobile engineer who focuses on building iOS applications from a product perspective. They know XCode and UIKit inside and out. They probably work primarily in Swift. They focus on UI and product (and less on performance or systems-level iOS development).
iOS Systems Engineer
Archetype
This is a mobile engineer who focuses on the lower levels of iOS applications. They may work on an SDK with no UI, or on networking or performance of an application. They view iOS devices as small Unix-like systems. They are comfortable with concurrency and manual memory management.
React Native Engineer
Archetype
This is a mobile engineer who uses React Native. They may have a mix of mobile and front-end experience. They probably take more of a product approach to what they do.