ios-developer
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Josh O'Connor and the Long Work of Making ClickUp Fit in a Pocket
Before ClickUp could travel in a pocket, someone had to decide what the pocket could live without. O'Connor's public trail is a decade-long lesson in mobile engineering: make the sprawling useful, make the complicated feel obvious, then keep shipping.
Mario Ciabarra Built a Unicorn by Watching Where the Internet Hurts
Before dashboards, funding rounds, and agentic AI, Mario Ciabarra learned a simpler lesson in a clothing store: frustration is obvious when you can see the customer. His career has been an attempt to give the internet that same pair of eyes.
Saoud Rizwan
Saoud Rizwan is the founder and CEO of Cline, an open-source AI coding agent that runs inside code editors like VS Code. He built the first version in June 2024, about ten days after Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, as a side project for the company's Build with Claude hackathon. He didn't win, but the project caught fire online and Cline has since passed millions of installs and raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital and Pace Capital. Before Cline, Rizwan was a prolific iOS and Swift open-source developer. His pitch is unusually blunt for the AI era: Cline captures zero margin on AI usage, shows developers exactly what each request costs, and lets them bring their own models.
Dhanush Balachandran
Dhanush Balachandran is the founder and CEO of Sortly, a visual, QR-code-driven inventory and asset tracking platform used by small businesses, families, and teams in construction, medical, retail, and education. A marketer-turned-iOS-developer, he taught himself to code, built an app originally called 'My Things,' rebranded it to Sortly, and grew it to millions of downloads. Before Sortly he spent over 15 years across Intel, Apple, DJI, and Y Media Labs, where he forecast worldwide CPU demand, priced server chips, and built ResearchKit medical research apps.
JB Bakst
JB Bakst is the founder and CEO of Chief, an AI email agent he pitches as 'the first inbox with good judgment.' A Stanford computer science grad and Manhattan native now based in Los Angeles, he cut his teeth as an early engineer at Airtable - where he obsessed over fun, delightful productivity UX - after starting out building iOS and full-stack at the six-person video-messaging startup Chime. His thesis for Chief: your email is a 12-year record of how you actually make decisions, so software should play those decisions forward rather than dump everything in a feed.
Chris Hannah
Chris Hannah is a UK-based senior software engineer at WorldFirst (Ant Group) who moonlights as an indie app maker. He builds Text Case, a text-transformation utility for iOS, iPadOS and macOS that has grown from 7 to 50-plus formats, plus Text Shot and a Text Case command-line tool. He writes across three blogs and a monthly long-form newsletter about indie tech, productivity, and the craft of working in bursts.
James Thomson
James Thomson is an independent iOS and Mac developer in Glasgow, Scotland, best known for PCalc, the scientific calculator he started in 1992 and has been refining ever since. He runs the two-person studio TLA Systems with his wife, having earlier worked at Apple on the Mac OS X Finder and Dock. A fixture of the Apple developer community, he is also a podcast pundit on Relay FM and The Incomparable, a conference speaker, and a Dungeons & Dragons player who photographs squirrels on the side.
Jeff Johnson
Jeff Johnson is a longtime independent Mac and iOS developer who runs Lapcat Software and the Underpass App Company. He is best known for StopTheMadness, a Safari extension that wrestles control of the browser back from hostile websites, and for being one of the sharpest public critics of Apple's privacy decisions, including the 2020 'OCSP appocalypse' that revealed macOS was phoning home unencrypted every time you launched an app. A philosophy graduate turned code archaeologist, he writes a widely read blog dissecting Apple's broken promises and has racked up a long list of CVE security credits across macOS, Safari, iOS, and WebKit.
Cody Ko
Cody Ko is a Canadian-American comedian, podcaster, and former software engineer who turned a viral iOS captioning app and a Vine following into one of the most influential creator-led comedy operations of the late 2010s. With Noel Miller he built Tiny Meat Gang, a comedy hip-hop act, podcast, and studio that scaled to hundreds of millions of downloads before he stepped away from TMG Studios in 2024.
Harshita Arora
Harshita Arora is General Partner at Y Combinator - the youngest in the organization's history - having dropped out of school at 15 in Saharanpur, India, taught herself to code, built and sold a crypto app featured by Apple at age 16, won India's Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Shakti Puraskar, moved to San Francisco on an O-1 visa, co-founded AtoB (the 'Stripe for Trucking' valued at ~$800M), and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 before joining YC as a Visiting Partner in 2025 and ascending to General Partner in April 2026 at age 25.
Todd Goldberg
Todd Goldberg is a San Francisco-based tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and art collector who sold his event ticketing startup Eventjoy (YC W14) to Ticketmaster in 2014, then co-founded Todd & Rahul Capital with Superhuman's Rahul Vohra - deploying $50M+ across 120+ startups including Mercury, Superhuman, Clearbit, and Supabase. He also co-founded Curated, a $30M+ NFT art fund backed by Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, and continues to ship indie products like Mailjoy, a bootstrapped direct mail platform.
Majid Jabrayilov
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.
Rudrank Riyam
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
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.