Ask HN: Is it worth switching from web development to native iOS dev?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

"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.

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...

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.

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.

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.