MacWorld has published an article discussing how difficult it is to hire qualified iOS developers:
“We’re 100 people, but we have work for 130 people. We just don’t have those extra 30 bodies,” Michaels says. He adds that salaries for experienced iPhone developers “just keep going up. Our year-over-year salaries are up almost 20 percent.”
iOS development is a demand market right now. There simply aren’t enough qualified developers to meet the enormous business demand. Due to the high technical nature of iPhone and iPad development work, this is a situation unlikely to improve in the near future.
The high market demand is pushing unqualified and marginally-qualified developers into the market, who are unable to deliver on business objectives. This is why horror stories of bad hires and bad contractors on the iOS market keep getting published. TapTapTap, a market leader in iOS publishing, writes about their bad contractor experience:
We continued to sink a lot more money into the project, partly because we wanted to add some cool features that we came up with, but mainly because Daniel couldn’t deliver anything even close to being worthy of shipping. And even though we weren’t supposed to pay until completion of the project, we did so on good faith, mainly because of Daniel’s never ending sob-stories. literally months would go by without an ounce of work being done on the app. When he did actually come around to doing some work on it, subsequent builds improved slightly, but we never got the the point where someone would ask us about plasma and we’d be proud to show it to them… instead it was usually quite the opposite and more of an embarrassment for us.
MacWorld has this to say about overseas outsourcing:
“This is not a skill that goes well with outsourcing because the typical shops in India and the Ukraine are focused on wider-breadth technologies such as Windows, and there aren’t a lot of Mac developers there,” Michaels explained. “Most of the Mac developers have always been around Cupertino and San Francisco, where Apple is located, and there are some in Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.”
When you are looking for an iPhone or iPad developer for your project, make sure that you do the technical due diligence to hire a candidate with a track record of timely delivery of iOS projects that operate well, are written with best practices in software engineering, and meet technical and functional requirements. Your project is too important to leave to chance.
