Apple App Designers For Hire

The Ultimate Guide to Hire iOS Developers: Salaries, Skills, and More

When choosing a platform to develop an app for, there are two options: iOS or Android. These two take up almost the entire mobile OS market share, and a substantial part of it belongs to Android. Why do you even need to hire iPhone app developer and build an app then? The thing is, the remaining part still represents a tremendous army of users, which developers and businesses simply cannot ignore. Apart from that, iOS generates more profit despite a smaller market share.

According to Statista, Apple's App Store has more than 2.22 billion apps. Consumers spend as much as 80% more on iOS apps compared to Android ones. Such a tendency led to $41.5 billion in revenue, 1.8x higher than Google Play income. However, iOS is loved by developers from all over the world, not only for this advancement. The simplicity of development and minimalistic approach which company sticks to also make a difference.

The iOS audience is exceptionally loyal and devoted to the Apple brand. Users actively utilize all the company's digital products, and are ready to spend money on them. Thus, the development for this platform will not lose its relevance for a long time, and iOS developer demand is high nowadays. There are no fragmentation problems as the lineup of Apple devices is relatively small and all of them have a unified UI.

To build an iOS app, you'll need to hire an iPhone application developer working with Objective-C or Swift in Xcode or any other IDE. This guide also covers the vital points you need to learn before you hire iOS programmer.

iOS Developer Roles and Responsibilities

The iOS development project requires a team comprising a project manager, UI/UX designers, back-end developers, QA engineers, and obviously, iOS developers. Not everyone understands the full scale of duties that are fulfilled by last specialists. In fact, the borders of iOS developer responsibilities go beyond writing code. They take part at every stage of app development, from planning and design aspects (wireframing screens, building UI) to testing and launching the app to the App Store. Thus, every teammate is essential in the development flow, but the iOS developers play a vitally significant part. So avoid trying to decrease expenditures on their work.

Design awareness is what you should pay due attention to while looking for iOS developer candidate. The point is, the qualitative UI/UX design services aren't only designers' responsibilities since the responsibilities of iOS developer comprise transferring good experience to final users. That's why among iOS developer key skills should be experienced with both UI/UX, understand their principles, and, of course, be good at programming in Swift or other languages.

Junior, Middle, and Senior iOS Developers

Typically, the versatility of developers depends on their working experience. Respectively, the more projects a developer has worked on, the more complex and diverse tech problems he/she can solve. In the IT industry, the skills of programmers are divided into three levels: junior, middle, and senior.

Junior iOS developer

It's an entry level iOS developer. In companies, junior developers most commonly work alongside their more experienced colleagues to improve their knowledge and enhance skills. It usually takes a few years for junior developers to level up.

Middle iOS developer

After working on various complex projects, developers move from beginners to a more advanced level that's called middle or mid level iOS developer. Here they have more independence in terms of working on projects.

Senior iOS developer

Senior iOS developer is an experienced developer that has seen tons of code and released dozens of apps. Typically, such developers not just code and design an app but deal with iOS testing frameworks, integration of APIs, and security matters. Consequently, iOS senior developer salary is higher.

Considering everything mentioned above, you're willing to choose whether your project requires less or more experienced iOS software engineer. The critical factor here is your budget, as salaries for each level may vary dramatically. The project complexity also matters since the junior developer will barely cope well with a large project with a complicated business logic.

iOS Developer Skill Set

The scope of iOS developer largely depends on your project. However, the general skills needed for iOS developer should look something like this:

Proficient with Swift or Objective-C programming language;
Knowledge of Xcode IDE;
Experience with APIs like Cocoa Touch and UIKit;
Understanding of RESTful APIs;
Understanding of UI and UX design standards;
Knowledge of Apple Human Interface Guidelines;
Experience with Metal or OpenGL;
Advanced knowledge of code versioning tools like Git;
Knowledge of Core Data framework.

iOS developer skills to look for

iOS developer requirements

How to Hire an iPhone App Developer?

Now, when you understand the roles and responsibilities of iOS developers and know what skills you should look for, it's time to talk about where and how exactly to hire iphone programmer.

In fact, there are three well-known options to find iOS developer for hire, such as:

Option#1. Freelance iOS developer
Option#2. In-house team of developers
Option#3. Software outsourcing company

However, which one is the most suitable in your case? Let's sort this out.

When to hire a freelance iOS developer?

Freelancers are a quite wide-spread option for any kind of services, and it's not a problem to find and hire someone to make an app for you. However, freelance iOS app developers aren't the best option in case you're looking for long-term cooperation; it is more about hiring a part-time iOS developer.

It may be more reasonable to hire freelancers to fulfill a project with certain requirements and deadlines. For instance, you can hire freelance iOS developers for bug fixing or perform tasks related to adding additional features to a ready-made app. If you want to find iPhone app developer for your project among the freelancers, please note that the main drawback of hiring them for the project development from scratch is the total absence of quality guarantee. What's more, you aren't able to manage and control them. Thus, the final product may not meet your requirements and deadlines. If you don't have a development team, the best option is to apply to experienced and competent outsourcing companies.

Probably, you wonder where to find freelance iOS developers for hire? While there are dozens of websites allowing you to find companies and freelancers from all around the world, Upwork is among the most popular and credible ones.

How to hire top iPhone app developers

Searching for freelancers on UpWork

We can also recommend you using LinkedIn to find iOS developers and hire them.

How to hire top iPhone app developers on LinkedIn

Searching for freelancers on LinkedIn

Pros

The freelance market is full of iOS developers you can pick from and, respectively, you're unlikely to face problems with finding the right developer for your project
Hiring a freelancer is often cheaper compared to other options
You don't have to pay a salary to a freelance worker in case you have no work for him/her
No worries about taxes, office space, vacations, sick leaves, etc.

Cons

Freelancers can't cooperate with other developers participating in a project as closely as, let's say, in-house or outsourced workers can
Nobody can give you a 100% guarantee that your freelance employee won't abandon the project one day and simply disappear
Failed deadlines are a widespread problem among freelancers
Language and cultural barriers are also among the problems of working with freelancers
You can't be sure your freelance developer is involved only in your project and has no side customers
A freelancer's work implies frequent changes of projects, and your freelance developer may simply switch to another project if he/she gets bored or stuck on a problem

To learn whether a developer has the required expertise, you can check the iOS developer portfolio or ask about expertise directly. In case you're considering an iOS app development company, look for a dedicated page or case study on the website.

When to Form an In-house Development Team?

Let's proceed to the advantages and disadvantages of in-house software development. A plethora of startup companies have utilized outsourcing software development services of their products and only then started thinking over forming an in-house software development team. Skype, Slack, Opera, and many other giants are among them.

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Let's go on and consider in-house development advantages and disadvantages. If you're a startup company, it's more rational to outsource software development and gather the in-house team together when a viability point is achieved. What does it mean? The viability is visible when the product is deployed to the market, and sponsors or users (or both) are engaged in it. This fact alone may indicate the perspective of attracting fundings or generating profit from monetization in the future. If you're a startup company, it's a more balanced solution for you to outsource software development and put the in-house team together when a viability point will be reached. What does it mean? The viability comes when you have launched a product to the market and see that investors or users (or both) start taking interest in it. This fact alone may indicate the perspective of attracting fundings or generating profit from monetization in future.

Thus, you can begin distributing resources to hire dedicated iOS developers and other tech experts to work in-house. It's not a universal plan for startups but is still a good option. Nevertheless, the advantages of in-house development may be helpful for middle-sized firms and establishments which build specific products with sophisticated business logic requiring regular cooperation of programmers and other departments.

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of in-house software development:

Pros

Your employees can work together 24/7
No limitations in communication and distance
Developers are provided with in-depth information of your project as they work only on yours

Cons

In-house development is on the payroll, so salaries are obligatory even in case you have no tasks for them
Hiring the right talents is a challenging task, and don't forget they sometimes leave, so you have to be ready to search for new ones constantly
Taxes, office space rent, hardware, software, and other related stuff you have to pay for
Vacations, sick leaves, and other perks your employees enjoy while you're paying them off

When to Hire an Outsourcing Company?

If you're looking for an economical and fast option to hire iOS developers, you should turn your mind to software outsourcing companies.

As a rule, they offer two cooperation models:

Dedicated Team

You hire iOS app developer (it doesn't matter one, two, three, or more) and pay due to the per hour rate of that company on every member. This option is also known as an outstaffing or dedicated developer team. In case you select it, you'll take over all the management of in-house application development, and the employees can work both in your already existing team (if any) or accomplish your tasks.

Outsourcing

You contact the outsource software development company's representatives, detail your requirements, and top iPhone app developers execute your project from scratch. All the management aspects and responsibilities for the entire chain of processes (from design to release), lay on the company.

It's significant to mention that there are some key factors that will help you to hire dedicated iPhone developer successfully:

Portfolio. Your potential partner should have excellent previous project samples
Rates and reviews. The best way to check the vendor's suitability is to see if the prior or current clients are satisfied
Social media accounts. Publications located there may help you assess if the company is competent enough to share the extra info with its followers

Where to find iOS developers?

There you'll find detailed information about firms, reviews from their customers, as well as flexible search by countries, industries, hourly rates, and more.

Clutch. This platform Comprises 150.000+ agencies in 500+ categories, software development companies as well.
GoodFirms. It allows users to check authenticated reviews and has 60000+ services and software companies.
GitHub. This platform allows you to select among over 65 million developers and 3 million organizations.

Searching for firms on Clutch

Pros

If you urgently need to find iOS developer with extensive experience, an outsourcing company is one of the best options as such firms keep an eye on their employees' skills and train them all the time to stick to high industry standards
No vacations, dismissals, recruiting, and anything else that may freeze the project development
Unlike freelancers, iOS developers in one company can communicate all the time and discuss the experience
Ordinarily, freelance iOS developer rates and rates of experienced programmers working in a company are the same or even lower (it depends on a region)
Fewer expenditures than hiring an in-house developer and you don't have to pay taxes
All the organizational issues are on the shoulders of the company's project manager, who keeps in touch with you

Cons

If the company you've picked is situated in another country, there may be communication delays which can be overcome by setting up a simple schedule
Cultural gap and language barrier

Factors to Consider Before Hiring an iOS Developer

So, you've picked the most suitable hiring option for your case. Is there anything else to pay attention to before you hire iOS developers? You bet! Let's split the points for consideration into two categories:

Hard Skills

This group includes the proficiency, knowledge, expertise level, and technical skills required for iOS developer.

Full-on experience

Experience is a vital factor, especially when it comes to software development services. We've already touched upon the division of software engineers into levels. Those levels are often assigned to developers depending on their work experience in the tech industry:

Junior -- up to 2 years;
Middle -- from 2 to 5 years;
Senior -- over 5 years.

Hands-on expertise

Experience and expertise are two different notions that develop technical skills for iOS developer. The expertise means that the developer has already dealt with certain apps or worked on projects focused on a specific industry (e.g., logistics). It's a good idea to pay your attention not only to experience but expertise as well. To learn whether a developer has the required expertise, you can check the iOS developer portfolio or ask about expertise directly. In case you're considering an outsourcing company, look for a dedicated page or case study on the website.

Portfolio

This is another crucial factor that will help to estimate iOS developer technical skills. By checking the portfolio of a candidate or company, you can see both their experience and expertise. What's more, you can try out apps they've developed and evaluate their overall proficiency as well as their attention to detail.

Please note, that the number of years spent writing code isn't a marker of high iOS developer qualifications. Pay your attention to the number of projects this specialist was involved in rather than the time he/she works as a developer. Otherwise, you put yourself at risk to hire a narrowly focused developer who has spent the entire career supporting one specific app.

Hint: Companies often write comprehensive articles on their blogs about their past projects. There, you'll find tons of information to understand the iOS developer skills level.

Soft Skills

These skills required for iOS developer incorporate personal traits that impact working productivity. They also help to maintain a proper dialogue with teammates, enhance the working environment, and, as a result, to make the workflow more efficient.

Communicating Skills

If your remote iOS developer or software development company is placed in another country or continent, you have to establish a stable communication channel. As a rule, a bit of scheduling and specialized software like Slack or Skype solve this problem. However, discuss this point beforehand.

Time Management

This skill is integral for meeting deadlines and indicating the self-organization level, which goes hand in hand with the efficiency of each developer during the development flow.

Problem-Solving Approach

The ability to find solutions by applying such an approach and a creative way of thinking will help the developer overcome all the building challenges quickly and productively.

Set Up Your iOS Developer Requirements

To define your requirement for ios developers properly, you should understand the cooperation flow with your future partner.

You can observe the services step by step required to build a successful application below:

Consultation. It allows assessing if the company can meet your requirements and negotiate your potential cooperation.
Discovery Phase. This stage commonly involves the product architecture and thorough features detailing.
Development by Sprints. It incorporates the technical implementation of the functionality, quality assurance, delivery, and deployment process of your product.
Product Release. The step of launching the product to the market.
Further Support. The developers are essential for the subsequent support, bug fixing, and updating after the application launching.

Before applying to any specialist, discussing anything, or signing an iOS developer contract, you have to learn your project inside and out. That's the only way to make informed decisions and set the proper requirements for the expert. Here are several tips that'll help you approach this process:

Describe the Overall Idea

Write down the general idea of your application in order not to get lost in your thoughts. You can devote a small paragraph or a sentence to this description and focus on the app's use cases or the main problems it should solve. This will help you concentrate and put your thoughts together.

Set Your Goal

Describe goals you plan to reach both in the short term and long run. E.g. get a thousand downloads, find investors, hit the top on app stores etc. By evaluating your goals, you can understand the scale of your app and set the direction for further development.

Describe the Functionality

It's pretty simple to describe the app's functionality. Just think and make up a list of features you want to be implemented in your application. Thus, your iOS developers will better understand what they are going to deal with.

Set Priorities

It's a good idea to prioritize features so that developers know what they should focus their attention on first. There is a variety of prioritization strategies that can help you decide what features should come first.

iOS developer salary rates

The iOS developer hourly rate is one of the decisive factors for most customers. Those rates vary depending on a hiring option you choose as well as the region you're intended to form an in-house team in or hire remote iOS developers from.

Average iOS Developer Salary

The service cost of an iOS developer per hour is one of the decisive factors for most customers. iOS software engineer salary varies depending on the hiring option you choose as well as the region you're intended to form an in-house team in or hire remote iOS developers from.

Here's the average iOS developer USA salary:

Average salary of iOS developer in USA

Average iOS software engineer salary (Source: Glassdoor)

iOS App Developer Salary in USA:

If you want to recruit experienced talents who will work as a part of your full-time team, you have to offer them a competitive salary. As for the US, the average iOS app developer salary is about $97.214K.

You can see a detailed table below:
Position	Average Salary
iOS App Developer	$98,077
iOS Mobile Developer	$102,753
iOS Software Developer	$93,007
iOS Software Engineer	$113,423
Average Annual Salary	$97,214

However, iOS app developer salary in USA largely depends on a state since each one has a different number of talents and supply for them not talking about the cost of living.

Freelance iOS developer salary

According to the data published by UpWork (it covers freelance iOS developers from all over the world), the average iOS developer hourly rate ranges between $40-60.

This way, the eight-hour workday will cost you $400 on average. It's $2000 a week and $8000 a month. But remember, these figures are approximate. You can find iOS developer rates that are above or below average.

iOS Developer Salary (Europe)

The cost of hiring an iOS app developer working for the software outsourcing company depends on the country and even the continent in which this company is situated. As the iPhone app developer salary in North America is pretty high, you can expect bills with lots of zeros. The same thing with Australia and most countries of Western Europe. Asia is a pretty cheap option, but you may encounter a language barrier and a cultural gap when working with local companies.

If you're seeking the perfect value for money, you should consider Eastern Europe in general and Ukraine in particular. The price for development is low, while the number of top iOS app developers is high. That's the reason why tech giants like Oracle apply to IT Outsourcing to Ukraine.

iOS developer salary by region on the world map

iOS app development hourly rates by regions on a world map

Reasons to hire iOS developers at Cleveroad

Cleveroad is a software development company that has more than 10 years of experience in providing various services for a wide range of domains. What is more, we have a full team ready to realize your outstanding original product from scratch.

Mobile app development is one of the key services we provide to our customers. Our iOS developers have successfully released dozens of apps. As each project is unique and has specific requirements, we have worked with various technologies and industries, including real estate, banking, retail, and more. Thus, we have extensive expertise in a variety of industries. The iOS department in our company works with both Objective-C and Swift programming languages. However, most projects are built with Swift as it has different advantages (e.g., clean syntax) allowing to speed up the development process and create more qualitative products.

We use Agile development methodology in order to provide our customers with a high level of flexibility and transparency. This methodology allows customers to see the result after each sprint (a set number of features for the set period) and make changes to app requirements if necessary.

We hope this guide will help you overcome challenges on your way to hire iOS developer.

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Why Americans Choose Ukrainian Outsourcing Companies? 5 Reasons!

Frequently Asked Questions

First off, you have to decide what hiring option is right for you:

Freelancer
In-house employee
Vendor

Freelancers are often unreliable but offer pretty low rates. Picking this option, you should be ready for delays and mediocre product quality.

In-house employees are a good but very expensive option for some regions. They're the only choice you have if you want to hire a developer to your office, not a remote one.

Software development vendors usually offer the best value for money especially talking about outsourcing companies. Pay your attention to vendors from Ukraine offering iOS developers as a dedicated team. Rates are competitive while the quality is high due to thorough recruiting and optimized processes.

Again, everything depends on what type of employment you're considering: freelance, in-house employee or outsourcing.

Here are the platforms where you can find iOS developers under any suitable option:

Freelancers — Upwork, Fiverr, Toptal
In-house employees — LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor
Outsourcing — Clutch, GoodFirms, AppFutura

It depends on the type of employment (freelance, in-house, outsourcing) and even more heavily on the region.

Underneath, I'm attaching the average rates per hour for iOS developers in different regions of the world:

Eastern Europe (Ukraine) — $35/h
Western Europe — $70/h
North America — $150/h
South America — $43/h
Australia — $110/h
Asia — $30/h

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Alicia Thomos

23.04.2021 at 07:37

Thank you so much for sharing informative blogs about how we can hire the best developers. Hire dedicated iOS developers you can also hire hourly or part-time developers as we know some projects did not require a full-time developer. Must check the experiences and skills of developers. Waiting for your next blog which is relevant to hire a developer on a part-time or hourly basis which topics must be required.