The Discipline Behind the Output
There is a version of the Majid Jabrayilov story that focuses on the numbers: 29,000 Twitter followers, 10,000 newsletter subscribers, 231 weekly issues. Those numbers are real and they are good. But they miss the more interesting thing, which is what it takes to produce at that level for that long.
Jabrayilov has been publishing his blog since 2018 and running the SwiftUI Weekly newsletter since 2019. That means he has written something every week for over five years on Apple platform development. The tech landscape changes constantly - new APIs, new frameworks, new hardware, new WWDC announcements each June - and he has covered all of it in real time. The newsletter has reached 231+ consecutive issues.
This is a peculiar kind of ambition. It's not about going viral or landing a big funding round. It's about showing up. Week after week. Building a reputation that compounds slowly and becomes nearly indestructible over time. In a world optimized for quick wins, there's something worth noticing about someone who just... keeps going.
Baku to the World: How Geography Stopped Mattering
Most of the global iOS developer conversation happens through a handful of English-language platforms - Twitter, GitHub, Substack, YouTube. Jabrayilov understood this early. His blog is in English, his newsletter is in English, his GitHub repositories are in English. He built for the global audience from day one.
His path to going fully indie included a stint working remotely for Snowdog, a Poland-based eCommerce agency, while still based in Baku. This was before remote work became the default. He figured out the mechanics of working across time zones and cultural contexts years before most people had to. When he eventually went fully independent, the infrastructure was already in place.
Azerbaijan doesn't appear much in Apple developer discourse. Jabrayilov changed that, quietly. He appears on the Swift Package Index, in podcast episodes with American hosts, in Indie Dev Monday features. He's simply present where the conversation happens - not because of geography, but despite it.
Biohacker Builds Biohacker Apps
The "biohacker" label in Jabrayilov's bio isn't marketing. His suite of apps - CardioBot, NapBot, SugarBot, FastBot - are tools he uses on himself. CardioBot analyzes Apple Watch heart rate data. NapBot tracks sleep with machine learning. This is someone who built software to monitor his own health, and then published it for others to use.
There's an intellectual honesty in that approach. He's not building apps about health tracking in the abstract. He is health tracking, and the apps are the artifact. When 9to5Mac featured CardioBot and NapBot for their iOS 14 redesign in September 2020, what they were covering was not just a software update - it was the output of someone obsessively iterating on tools they personally rely on.
The SwiftUICharts library on GitHub came from the same place. He needed good charts for CardioBot and NapBot. No suitable library existed in SwiftUI at the time. So he built one, open-sourced it, and it has accumulated 1,390+ stars. Practical problem, practical solution, public benefit.
What He Actually Thinks About Apple
Jabrayilov isn't a pure Apple cheerleader. He has been publicly critical about Apple's developer documentation, particularly by comparison with Android. "Android developers have clear guides and patterns, and most importantly, real-world examples that show how to structure production apps." That's a pointed observation from someone who has spent his entire career on the Apple side.
His apps are built to look as native as possible. He believes apps should be "the continuation of the OS" - not branded departures from platform conventions, but extensions of how the operating system already works. This is both a design philosophy and a practical constraint: native-looking apps tend to survive OS updates better than heavily customized ones.
On AI-assisted development, he's pragmatic rather than ideological: "It's the reality we're in today, and I honestly can't live without it anymore myself." No dramatic stance, just honest assessment of how the tools have changed the work.
The Economics of Indie
Going indie sounds liberating. Jabrayilov is clear-eyed about the tradeoff: "The essential part is the opportunity to work on the ideas I enjoy, but the hardest part of being indie is to make revenue that allows you to survive." This is the tension every indie developer navigates - creative freedom funded by the market.
His model is diversified by design. Apps on the App Store generate revenue through optional subscriptions ($0.99/month or $9.99/year for premium features). The blog and newsletter build audience. The audience creates visibility for the apps. Open source libraries create GitHub presence, which feeds credibility, which feeds audience. Each piece reinforces the others without depending entirely on any single one.
He left Snowdog around late 2019 or early 2020. By April 2021, when Indie Dev Monday featured him, he'd been fully indie for roughly 1.5 years. The fact that he was still there, still publishing, still building - that was the answer to whether the bet had paid off.
The Mastodon Presence Nobody Talks About
Twitter/X gets most of the attention - 28,900 followers, joined 2009. But Jabrayilov has also built a significant Mastodon presence under @Mecid@mastodon.social, with 1,840 followers and over 8,090 posts. In a world where developer communities have fragmented across platforms, he's maintained consistent presence across multiple networks without diluting his voice on any of them.
The handle is the same everywhere: mecid. No confusion about who you're talking to, no brand fragmentation, no alternate persona for "professional" versus "personal" content. This level of consistency across a decade of platforms is either very deliberate or very natural. Probably both.
Why Developers Actually Follow Him
There are plenty of iOS developers who write occasionally. There are far fewer who write well, consistently, about genuinely complex topics. SwiftUI is not a simple framework - its state management model, its layout system, its navigation APIs, its integration with UIKit - all of this requires real expertise to explain clearly. Jabrayilov has that expertise and the writing discipline to deploy it week after week.
His posts tend to be practical without being trivial. He covers real architecture decisions, not just API documentation. He explains the reasoning behind patterns, not just the patterns themselves. And because he's using the same frameworks in his own shipped apps, his examples come from actual production code rather than invented toy examples.
That combination - expertise, consistency, production experience, clarity - is rare. The 29,000 Twitter followers are a byproduct of that rarity, not the point of it.