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

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

>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.

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.

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.