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Top 17 iOS Developers for Scalable Apps

e2fdd8c4279a3d58dc6bd767cdb2bbfc 2 - Top 17 iOS Developers for Scalable Apps

The global iOS development community is thriving with talent across every corner of the world.

Here we present an updated, ranked list of the best iOS developers today, selected for their outstanding open-source contributions, founding of tech startups while continuing to code, influential blogging and community presence, leadership roles at major tech companies, and even accolades in programming competitions. These individuals have all made a significant impact on the iOS ecosystem in the recent years:

  1. John Sundell
  2. Paul Hudson
  3. Majid Jabrayilov
  4. Felix Krause
  5. Marin Todorov
  6. Ray Wenderlich
  7. Mattt Thompson
  8. Erica Sadun
  9. Miguel de Icaza
  10. Krzysztof Zabłocki
  11. Ash Furrow
  12. Soroush Khanlou
  13. Ayaka Nonaka
  14. Steve Troughton-Smith
  15. Olivier Halligon
  16. Chris Eidhof
  17. Nick Lockwood

Now, let’s delve into their remarkable achievements and contributions.

John Sundell

YouTube Video

A practical guide to Swift performance.

Nationality: Swedish

John is a former lead iOS developer at Spotify who went indie and became one of the most prominent voices in the Swift community.

He is the creator of Swift by Sundell, a popular weekly blog and podcast series where he shares tutorials, tips, and deep dives into Swift development. John is also a prolific open-source contributor – he’s built tools and libraries like Publish (a Swift static site generator) and Ink (a Markdown parser), and contributes regularly to community projects. His work exemplifies how one can influence an entire developer community through knowledge-sharing and code. As a conference speaker, John has inspired developers worldwide with talks on topics ranging from UIKit to SwiftUI.

In summary, he scores high for influential blogging and open-source contributions, and for helping many developers learn Swift best practices.

Paul Hudson

Swift is designed to be fun, expressive, and safe by default. Lean into that.

Nationality: British

Paul is the author and educator behind Hacking with Swift, the world’s largest site dedicated to teaching iOS development.

A former software journalist turned full-time Swift developer, Paul has authored 20+ books on Swift, iOS, macOS, and related technologies. His free online tutorials (like 100 Days of Swift and 100 Days of SwiftUI) have become a go-to resource for learners globally. Paul’s work epitomizes community influence – he makes complex topics accessible and fun, and is an enthusiastic speaker at iOS conferences and on his YouTube channel. While not a startup founder, he has built many apps used by millions and even wrote enterprise apps earlier in his career.

Hudson’s equal strengths in writing, teaching, and coding place him among the top iOS devs shaping the community’s growth.

Majid Jabrayilov

Nationality: Azerbaijani

Majid is an indie iOS developer and one of the most prominent SwiftUI content creators.

He is the creator of apps like CardioBot (heart-rate tracker) and NapBot (sleep tracker) for Apple Watch, as well as the author of Swift with Majid, a blog dedicated to Swift and SwiftUI tutorials. Majid also curates SwiftUI Weekly, a popular newsletter that aggregates SwiftUI tips for developers. His educational writing has had a global impact – many developers (and Google search results!) point to his articles when solving SwiftUI problems. Majid’s ability to balance building his own products with teaching the community is remarkable.

Through open-source contributions (he shares code for SwiftUI techniques) and weekly posts, he embodies how indie developers can influence best practices worldwide.

Felix Krause

Top 17 iOS Developers for Scalable Apps

Nationality: Austrian

Felix is the creator of fastlane, the hugely popular open-source automation toolset for iOS/Android deployment.

He founded fastlane as a college project, which quickly became indispensable at companies worldwide for simplifying app build and release processes. In 2015, Twitter acquired fastlane, and Felix joined Twitter’s Fabric mobile team; shortly thereafter, Google acquired Fabric, so Felix found himself at Google – completing his personal goal of working there. Beyond fastlane, he has conducted influential security research on iOS (exposing camera privacy issues and phishing risks) that led to Apple addressing them. Today, Felix continues to create and advise on developer tools and focuses on privacy/security projects.

His journey – from open-source founder to roles at Twitter/Google – exemplifies equal strengths in coding innovation and industry impact.

Marin Todorov

Nationality: Bulgarian

Marin is a veteran iOS developer, speaker, and author.

As one of the original founding members of the Ray Wenderlich tutorial team, Marin has co-authored eight renowned iOS books – including iOS Animations by Tutorials and Modern Concurrency in Swift. He’s also an indie developer who creates developer tools: Marin built Timelane (a Combine debugging tool) and dataTile (an innovative logging UI), both open-sourced to help fellow developers. Marin actively blogs and shares knowledge on his site and is known for his engaging conference talks on topics like Functional Reactive Programming. Currently a contractor for high-profile clients, he balances writing, teaching, and coding new libraries.

Todorov’s contributions to open source (e.g. SwiftFormat contributions and various libraries) and educational content have made a lasting global impact over the past decade.

Ray Wenderlich

Nationality: American

Raymond (“Ray”) is best known as the founder of raywenderlich.com, now rebranded as Kodeco, which grew from a personal blog into the leading iOS learning platform with over 200 contributors.

Ray started writing iOS tutorials in 2010 while developing his own apps, and the demand exploded – he built a dedicated team and published hundreds of high-quality tutorials, books, and videos that have taught countless developers worldwide. Under Ray’s leadership, the site produced acclaimed resources like the iOS by Tutorials book series and video courses on every aspect of app development. Though he has transitioned to more of a management role in recent years, Ray continued to code and review content as the team scaled. His influence is immense: almost every iOS engineer from the 2010s has read or watched a Ray Wenderlich tutorial.

Ray exemplifies tech entrepreneurship (turning a blog into a thriving company) and community-building in the iOS world.

Mattt Thompson

Top 17 iOS Developers for Scalable Apps

Nationality: American

Mattt (yes, three T’s) is legendary in the Cocoa community for his work on open source and writing.

He is the original creator of AFNetworking, the Objective-C networking library that for years was virtually ubiquitous in iOS apps. He also founded NSHipster, a blog exploring “obscure” iOS APIs and tricks, which became a beloved resource for intermediate/advanced devs. Mattt’s career spans major roles: he was Mobile Lead at Heroku and later joined Apple as a technical writer to work on Swift documentation. He has built numerous popular tools (from Postgres.app for Mac to Swift frameworks). Mattt also founded Flight School, a book series for Swift, demonstrating his continued passion for developer education. His impact on open-source is immense – AFNetworking and its Swift successor Alamofire (which he helped transition) shaped networking on iOS.

Few developers have contributed as broadly: libraries, articles, books, and mentoring others. Thompson stands out for open-source leadership and influential writing.

Erica Sadun

Nationality: American

Erica is a highly respected software engineer, author, and blogger in the Apple developer community.

She has written or co-written more Swift Evolution language proposals than anyone outside of Apple’s core team, helping to shape the Swift language itself. Erica has also authored dozens of books on iOS and Mac development (her “Swift Developer’s Cookbook” and “Swift Style” are classics). In the early days of iPhone, she famously reverse-engineered undocumented APIs and shared her findings, and today her blog is known for deep technical explorations. Sadun is a regular contributor on Swift forums and a go-to expert for advanced iOS topics. She scores top marks in influential writing and open-source contributions (e.g. utility libraries, Swift snippets) and is often cited for her insightful commentary on Apple’s APIs.

In short, if you’ve been an iOS developer for long, you’ve almost certainly come across Erica Sadun’s work.

Miguel de Icaza

Nationality: Mexican-American

Miguel is an icon of open-source software who brought his talents to the mobile space by co-founding Xamarin in 2011.

Xamarin’s tools enabled C# and .NET developers to build native iOS apps, long before “cross-platform” was cool. Miguel’s background is extraordinary: he earlier started the GNOME desktop project and Mono (open-source .NET) – so he was already a legend when he turned to mobile. As CTO of Xamarin, he actively coded and guided development of Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch) which became a widely used framework for enterprise apps. Microsoft acquired Xamarin in 2016, and Miguel served as a Director at Microsoft, continuing to advocate for open-source within the company. Today he’s involved in new ventures (like co-founding NextDNS after leaving Microsoft). Miguel’s contributions to iOS are indirect but deep: by enabling .NET on iOS, he broadened the platform’s reach.

He embodies technical excellence (compiler/runtime development) and startup leadership, all while being a passionate coder at heart.

Krzysztof Zablocki

Top 17 iOS Developers for Scalable Apps

Nationality: Polish

Krzysztof is the author of some of the most widely used developer tools in the Swift ecosystem.

He created Sourcery, the metaprogramming code generator that has been adopted by over 40,000 apps to reduce Swift boilerplate. He also developed Playgrounds for Objective-C (way before Apple’s Swift Playgrounds) and popular libraries like Reusable (generic UI code) and LifetimeTracker (to catch memory leaks). Krzysztof is a Principal Engineer known for his time leading mobile architecture at The New York Times and now at The Browser Company. He also runs a technical blog (merowing.info) where he shares in-depth iOS tutorials and architecture tips. As a conference speaker, he’s given talks on app architecture and performance around the world.

Zabłocki scores top marks in open-source impact – tools like Sourcery and SwiftFormat (to which he contributes) are part of many teams’ workflows – as well as in big-tech leadership. He demonstrates how a developer from Eastern Europe can shape coding standards globally.

Ash Furrow

Nationality: Canadian

Ash is a developer and author who has left a mark through open source and community leadership.

He spent years at Artsy, where he led the Mobile Experience team and built Artsy’s auction app Eidolon as fully open source. Ash was an early adopter of Reactive Programming on iOS – he wrote Functional Reactive Programming on iOS (2014) and helped popularize frameworks like ReactiveCocoa. He also created Moya, one of the first Swift networking abstraction libraries, which became widely used in the community. Ash co-authored Women in Tech (he’s an advocate for diversity) and contributed to the Swift for Good charity book. He’s a frequent blogger (ashfurrow.com) on topics like open-source governance and testing, and co-hosted the podcast Fatal Error. After Artsy, Ash worked at Spotify and now Shopify, continuing to code and mentor.

His blend of open-source (Moya, etc.), writing, and real-world app development makes him a role model for community-oriented development.

Soroush Khanlou

Nationality: Iranian-American

Soroush is an independent iOS developer best known for his influential writing on app architecture.

His blog has introduced many iOS devs to concepts like the Coordinator pattern for navigation and thoughtful approaches to MVVM. Soroush has served as a lead iOS engineer in New York (formerly at Rent the Runway) and co-hosts the Fatal Error podcast. He was a speaker at try! Swift Tokyo and other conferences, known for clear explanations of tricky topics. Soroush also created some open-source libraries (e.g. Snake case JSON parsing utilities, Assorted utility kit) and often shares sample code on GitHub. While he isn’t a startup founder, he embodies community impact through ideas – his architecture posts are frequently cited by other engineers and even used in company coding guidelines.

For his contributions to iOS thought leadership and practical coding techniques, Soroush merits inclusion among the best.

Ayaka Nonaka

Top 17 iOS Developers for Scalable Apps

Nationality: Japanese

Ayaka is an engineering manager at Apple and a prolific iOS developer and speaker.

Prior to Apple, Ayaka made a name for herself as an iOS engineer at Venmo, Lyft, and as a co-creator of Realm Translator (Polyglot) and other side projects. At Apple, she has contributed to core iOS frameworks – she’s publicly mentioned working on UIKit, SwiftUI, and SpringBoard code in recent iOS releases. Ayaka is also well known on the conference circuit for talks on natural language processing in Swift and on testing techniques. She was recognized as a WWDC Scholarship winner early in her career and even competed in programming contests in college. Outside of work, Ayaka has been involved in the try! Swift conference organization.

Her achievements span big-tech impact (contributing to iOS system frameworks), open-source (linguistics toolkit Parsimmon), and community building (writing and speaking). She represents the new generation of iOS developers who bridge deep technical skill with a passion for sharing knowledge.

Steve Troughton-Smith

Nationality: Irish

Steve is an independent developer and self-taught hacker who has long been at the forefront of exploring Apple’s platforms.

He gained fame in the early iPhone days by tinkering with private APIs and enabling hidden features – for instance, he figured out how to run apps in windowed mode on iPad and uncovered countless unreleased features in iOS betas (often quoted by tech media). Steve has developed numerous apps for iOS and macOS; one example is Broadcasts, a popular radio streaming app (which he also ported to the Mac using Catalyst). He’s also known for creating insightful open-source sample projects on GitHub demonstrating advanced techniques. Apple has indirectly acknowledged Steve’s influence – he’s been thanked in WWDC sessions and invited to Apple Park for feedback. On Twitter, @stroughtonsmith has been a must-follow for iOS devs for over a decade due to his constant stream of discoveries.

While not a “traditional” open-source maintainer or company leader, Steve’s contributions to the iOS community via reverse engineering, toolmaking, and knowledge-sharing earn him a spot on this list.

Olivier Halligon

Nationality: French

Olivier (often known by his handle “AliSoftware”) is an iOS engineer who excels in tooling and dev infrastructure.

He’s the original author of OHHTTPStubs (widely used for unit-testing network calls) and the creator of SwiftGen, a code-generation tool that converts assets (storyboards, images, etc.) into type-safe Swift code. Olivier has been a long-time contributor to CocoaPods and fastlane as well, reflecting his passion for improving developer workflow. He works at Automattic focusing on iOS tooling and DevOps, which speaks to his expertise in CI/CD for mobile apps. Halligon is also a frequent speaker at conferences (try! Swift, FrenchKit) and shares knowledge on his blog about subjects like dependency injection and testing.

Through his open-source projects and community involvement, Olivier has improved the daily life of thousands of iOS developers. His work in automation and code generation particularly stands out, making formerly tedious tasks easier and less error-prone.

Chris Eidhof

Top 17 iOS Developers for Scalable Apps

Nationality: Dutch

Chris is a developer, author, and entrepreneur who co-founded objc.io, an online publication and book publisher that’s highly regarded in the Apple developer community.

Chris has co-authored influential books like Functional Swift, Advanced Swift, and Thinking in SwiftUI, which have helped developers adopt cutting-edge techniques. Through objc.io, he also runs Swift Talk, a subscription video series where Chris live-codes solutions to complex problems each week. In recent years, Chris created the SwiftUI Field Guide, an interactive guide to SwiftUI’s layout system, further solidifying his expertise in Apple’s newest UI framework. He also organized early iOS conferences (UIKonf in Berlin) to foster community knowledge-sharing. Chris’s impact spans starting a company (objc.io) that continues to produce top-notch content, writing open-source sample code, and delivering workshops worldwide.

His ability to explain advanced topics in simple terms has made him one of the most respected educators in the iOS world.

Nick Lockwood

Nationality: British

Nick is a highly respected iOS developer known for creating several invaluable open-source libraries.

He authored iCarousel (a sophisticated 3D carousel UI library) early in the App Store era, and more recently created SwiftFormat, a popular code formatter for Swift that many teams use to enforce style conventions. Nick literally “wrote the book” on iOS Core Animation – he authored iOS Core Animation: Advanced Techniques, sharing his deep expertise in graphics rendering. He has worked in both indie and large company settings and is often seen on forums helping others with tricky animation or parsing problems. Nick’s Euclid library (for 2D/3D geometry in Swift) and various utilities demonstrate his range from math-heavy code to developer tools.

With over a decade in iOS, he’s maintained a reputation for high-quality, well-documented code. Lockwood’s open-source contributions and educational writing (blogs and StackOverflow answers) have made a global impact on iOS developers.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. If you intend to share or make use of it in any way, we kindly ask that you include a backlink to the original source – EchoGlobal.

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