I believe that most of the business advice for iOS developers you read online is wrong.
I run both a freelancing business and an online business related to iOS development. The funny thing is that I do so ignoring most of the common business advice I usually read, while I still have great results for both my businesses. Most business advice I read aimed at app developers just makes me shake my head.
Ten years ago I moved my first steps developing apps for Apple platforms. Like many others, I had the dream to become an indie developer, make my own apps and be independent one day. It all started when I saw a presentation about being an indie developer by Will Shipley. I shared it with a friend and soon he came back to me with an idea for a Mac app (the iPhone still didn’t exist back then). At that time he was trying to follow the Zone Diet, which is a pretty complicated diet requiring a lot of calculations. So he though that an app to help people follow that diet would be a good business idea.
I have had many job interviews during my career, for different companies. Most of them were for a position as an iOS developer. I still have such interviews from time to time, even though I am a freelancer. This happens when big companies want to add me to their existing team to temporarily speed up their development process. Do you know what all these interviews had in common? They never focus only on iOS development. I would actually say that the questions about iOS development are usually around 50% of all the questions.
When I was in university, I had to take a course called “Foundations of computer science”. Since this course was placed in the second trimester of the first year, it was an immediate roadblock for many people. Unlike others, I found the course to be very easy and passed the exam quickly with the maximum grade, with almost no studying. I am not saying this to brag, but I think there is an important lesson there.
View controllers have a central role in iOS apps and build the skeleton of every app you make. This is because each screen of the app is represented by a single view controller. Because of this central role they have, they are at the center of a lot of activity and perform many duties during their lifetime.
A couple of years ago a company hired me for a last moment rescue of an app they were developing for a client of theirs. After months of development the app was late and full of bugs. The goal was fix as many bugs as possible in one week, before we delivered the app to the final client. This was not the first time I had to rescue a project and probably will not be the last. Any freelancer can tell you that, as deadlines get closer, companies sometimes bring in extra power to be able to meet them. As I poked around the code it became clearer and clearer what the source of the problem was.
Browsing Q&A websites I often find people having problems when learning iOS development through tutorials:
“I just don’t know how to make my own code. I can go through these tutorials and write their code and understand, I just don’t know how to implement it all by myself.”
This is understandable. Authors suppose their tutorial will introduce you to a topic, but all they do is to show you something without giving you the understanding of what you are doing. In the end you are only copying someone else’s code.