John Sundell is a Swift and Rust developer, writer and podcaster who runs Swift by Sundell, a weekly publication of articles, tips, podcasts and videos read in well over a hundred countries. A former lead iOS developer at Spotify, he went indie to build apps, games and a stack of widely used open-source developer tools - including the static site generator Publish, the type-safe HTML DSL Plot, the Markdown parser Ink and the syntax highlighter Splash. He is based in Gdansk, Poland.
Marco Arment is an independent iOS developer, podcaster, and blogger best known for building Overcast (a leading podcast app), co-founding Tumblr, and creating Instapaper. He co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP) with John Siracusa and Casey Liss, and writes at marco.org. His career is defined by principled solo craftsmanship - he operates Overcast entirely alone with no investors or employees, maintains a fierce privacy stance in his apps, and is famous for once pulling a #1 App Store app (Peace) after 36 hours on ethical grounds.
Majid Jabrayilov is an indie iOS developer, SwiftUI educator, and app creator based in Baku, Azerbaijan. Known by his handle 'mecid', he runs the popular Swift with Majid blog and SwiftUI Weekly newsletter, sharing weekly insights on SwiftUI, Swift, and Apple frameworks since 2018. He transitioned from corporate iOS development to full-time indie around 2019-2020, building a suite of health-focused apps including CardioBot and NapBot, and has grown a following of nearly 30,000 on Twitter/X while consistently publishing 230+ newsletter issues.
Michael Tsai is an indie Mac developer and the one-person operation behind C-Command Software, creator of SpamSieve - the gold-standard Bayesian spam filter for macOS that has been filtering email since 2002. He also runs one of the most respected daily link blogs in the Apple developer community, curating Mac and iOS developer news with original commentary since 2002. His roundups of community reaction to Apple events are so authoritative that Daring Fireball's John Gruber regularly links to them as the definitive overview.
Mark Moeykens is the creator behind Big Mountain Studio, the go-to source for SwiftUI visual learning. A Vermont-born, Salt Lake City-based iOS developer by day and prolific author by night, he pioneered the 'picture book' approach to programming education - combining code examples with visual diagrams so developers remember concepts up to 60,000 times faster. His library of SwiftUI Mastery books has reached 30,000+ developers across 140+ countries, and his free SwiftUI guide alone has been downloaded over 30,000 times.
Matt Birchler is a UX/UI product designer, tech blogger, YouTuber, indie app developer, and podcaster based in Illinois, USA. By day he designs at payments tech company NMI; by night he runs Birchtree - one of the longest-running independent Apple blogs on the internet, active since 2010 - and produces the 'A Better Computer' YouTube channel. He co-hosts the Comfort Zone podcast on MacStories, has built 8+ apps on the App Store, and operates a paid membership newsletter. His editorial independence is a point of pride: he never leaned on ads for income, keeping his voice authentically his own.
Riley Testut is an American indie iOS developer best known for creating GBA4iOS, Delta, and AltStore - tools that collectively redefined what's possible outside Apple's walled garden. Starting at age 13 with a Game Boy emulator built from scratch using Microsoft Paint graphics, Riley spent a decade fighting Apple's restrictions before seeing Delta hit #1 on the App Store in 2024 and launching the first EU-approved third-party iOS marketplace. His work forced Apple to change its App Store rules - twice - without a single lobbyist, just relentless building.
Rudrank Riyam is an iOS developer and creator from Gurugram, India, best known for MusadoraKit - a Swift framework that simplifies MusicKit and Apple Music API integration. A WWDC 2019 Scholar, Google Summer of Code 2019 alumni, and former Apple intern, he has built an impressive open-source portfolio spanning music, mesh gradients, vector databases, and AI tooling. His ASC CLI tool was acquired, and he now builds at Rork, an AI-powered no-code mobile app platform. He shares his journey through his AiOS Dispatch newsletter and a comprehensive ebook on MusicKit.
Sean Allen is a self-taught iOS developer, Swift educator, and content creator based in Charlotte, NC, best known for his YouTube channel with 170,000+ subscribers dedicated to iOS and Swift programming. A career changer who wrote his first line of code at ~32 and landed his first iOS job in just 7 months, he turned a bitter string of big-tech interview rejections into a YouTube channel built 'out of spite' - which became one of the most trusted independent iOS education platforms on the internet. Today he runs a three-pillar independent business: content creation, consulting, and indie app development, with his flagship app Creator View giving YouTube creators a business dashboard for channel analytics and income tracking.
Simon Støvring is a Danish indie iOS developer and principal iOS engineer at Framna, best known for creating Scriptable — the app that lets anyone automate their iPhone with JavaScript. By day he architects mobile apps for a Nordic agency; by night he ships beloved tools like Runestone (a Tree-sitter-powered text editor), Data Jar, and Jayson. His work sits at the intersection of power-user utility and delightful craftsmanship, earning him a loyal following among iOS enthusiasts, automation nerds, and developers worldwide.