SwiftUI & Beyond: Why Modern Skills Matter When You Hire iOS Developers
Carl Bailey
SwiftUI & Beyond: Why Modern Skills Matter When You Hire iOS Developers
The SwiftUI Revolution: More Than Just a Pretty UI
Declarative Syntax: Faster Development, Cleaner Code
Cross-Platform Power: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Beyond
The Performance and Maintainability Advantage
Beyond the UI: Essential Modern Swift Skills
Mastering Swift Concurrency (async/await)
The Power of the Combine Framework
Understanding Swift Package Manager (SPM)
How to Spot a Truly Modern iOS Developer
Analyzing GitHub and Portfolios for SwiftUI Projects
Vetting Knowledge of Modern Architecture Patterns
Interview Questions That Separate the Modern Dev from the Legacy Coder
Conclusion
References
SwiftUI & Beyond: Why Modern Skills Matter When You Hire iOS Developers
The iOS development landscape is in a constant state of evolution. Sticking with older technologies like UIKit can lead to slower development cycles and apps that are harder to maintain. Embracing modern frameworks like SwiftUI is no longer just a trend—it's a strategic necessity for building high-performance, future-proof applications. This is especially true when you need to hire expert iOS developers who can tackle cutting-edge projects. Whether you're hiring developers for AR, VR, and spatial computing or building apps with on-device machine learning, modern iOS skills are absolutely essential.
Think about it this way: would you hire a web developer who only knows jQuery in 2024? The same logic applies to iOS development. The tools and frameworks have evolved dramatically, and developers who haven't kept up are working with one hand tied behind their back.
The SwiftUI Revolution: More Than Just a Pretty UI
Introduced in 2019, SwiftUI represents Apple's modern approach to building user interfaces across all its platforms. Its advantages over the older UIKit framework are significant, leading to faster development and more maintainable code.
But here's what many people miss: SwiftUI isn't just about making things look nice. It's a fundamental shift in how we think about building apps. Instead of manually managing every UI update and state change, SwiftUI handles the heavy lifting for you. This means your developers can focus on what really matters—creating amazing user experiences.
Declarative Syntax: Faster Development, Cleaner Code
SwiftUI uses a declarative syntax, meaning developers describe what the UI should look like for a given state, and the framework handles the rest. This results in less code that is more readable and easier to maintain compared to the imperative, step-by-step approach of UIKit.
Let me paint you a picture. In UIKit, creating a simple button with a label might take 10-15 lines of code. You'd need to initialize the button, set its title, configure its appearance, add constraints, and wire up the action. In SwiftUI? You can do the same thing in 3-4 lines. That's not just fewer keystrokes—it's fewer places for bugs to hide.
The real magic happens when you need to update that UI. Say you want the button to change color when pressed. In UIKit, you'd write code to handle the touch event, update the button's properties, and maybe even manage animation states. SwiftUI? You just describe what the button looks like in each state, and it figures out the transitions automatically.
This declarative approach also makes code reviews a breeze. When a new developer joins your team, they can understand what's happening at a glance. No more diving through callback hell or trying to trace which method updates which view.
Cross-Platform Power: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Beyond
SwiftUI is designed to work across all Apple platforms, including iOS, macOS, watchOS, and even visionOS. This allows developers to share a significant amount of code, reducing development time and ensuring a consistent user experience across devices.
Here's where things get really interesting. Remember when you had to maintain separate codebases for your iPhone and iPad apps? Or when bringing your iOS app to Mac meant essentially starting from scratch? Those days are gone.
With SwiftUI, a single codebase can power your app across the entire Apple ecosystem. Sure, you'll still need platform-specific tweaks—a Mac app shouldn't feel like a blown-up iPhone app. But the core logic, the data models, and most of the UI can be shared. We're talking about 70-80% code reuse in many cases.
This isn't just about saving time (though that's a huge benefit). It's about consistency. When users switch from their iPhone to their iPad to their Mac, they get the same experience. Updates roll out simultaneously across platforms. Bug fixes apply everywhere at once.
And with Apple's push into spatial computing with Vision Pro, SwiftUI-savvy developers are already ahead of the game. The same principles and much of the same code can be adapted for these new platforms.
The Performance and Maintainability Advantage
SwiftUI simplifies UI creation with less boilerplate code and offers built-in state management, which leads to a more responsive user experience. Features like Live Preview in Xcode provide instant feedback, dramatically speeding up the development and iteration process.
Let's talk about what this means in practice. Traditional iOS development often felt like building a house of cards. Change one thing, and you'd spend hours tracking down all the places that depended on it. SwiftUI's state management is like having a smart home system—change the temperature setting, and every room adjusts automatically.
The Live Preview feature is a game-changer for productivity. Instead of the old cycle of write-compile-run-check-repeat, developers see their changes instantly. It's like the difference between painting blindfolded and painting with your eyes open. Design iterations that used to take hours now happen in minutes.
Performance-wise, SwiftUI is optimized from the ground up. It only redraws what's changed, automatically batches updates, and leverages the GPU efficiently. Your apps feel snappier, animations are smoother, and battery life improves. Users might not know why your app feels better—they just know it does.
Beyond the UI: Essential Modern Swift Skills
A truly modern iOS developer's skill set extends beyond just the UI framework. Proficiency in Swift's advanced features for managing concurrency and data flow is equally important for building responsive, high-performance apps.
The best iOS developers today are like master chefs who know not just recipes, but the science behind cooking. They understand the why, not just the how. This deeper knowledge is what separates good apps from great ones.
Mastering Swift Concurrency (async/await)
Modern apps need to perform network requests and other long-running tasks without freezing the user interface. Swift's built-in concurrency model, using async/await, provides a much cleaner and safer way to handle asynchronous operations compared to older methods like completion handlers.
Remember the callback pyramid of doom? Those nested completion handlers that made code look like it was sliding off the right edge of your screen? Async/await puts an end to that nightmare. Code that handles asynchronous operations now reads like synchronous code—top to bottom, easy to follow, easy to debug.
But it's not just about cleaner syntax. Swift's concurrency model helps prevent entire classes of bugs. Race conditions, deadlocks, and data races that used to keep developers up at night are now caught at compile time. The compiler becomes your safety net, catching problems before they ever reach your users.
Real-world example: fetching user data from an API, processing it, and updating the UI. With completion handlers, this might involve three or four nested callbacks, error handling at each level, and careful management of which thread you're on. With async/await? It's a straightforward sequence of operations that reads like a story.
The Power of the Combine Framework
Combine is a framework that provides a declarative Swift API for processing values over time. It is tightly integrated with SwiftUI and is excellent for handling events, network responses, and user inputs in a reactive way, leading to more robust and predictable app behavior.
Think of Combine as the circulatory system of your app. Data flows through publishers and subscribers like blood through veins and arteries. When something changes—a user taps a button, a network request completes, a timer fires—that change ripples through your app automatically.
The beauty of Combine is how it handles complexity. Say you're building a search feature. The user types, you want to wait a bit (debounce), check if the query is valid, make an API call, handle errors, and update the UI. With traditional approaches, this involves timers, flags, and careful state management. With Combine? It's a single chain of operations that clearly expresses your intent.
Combine also plays beautifully with SwiftUI. Your UI automatically updates when your data changes. No more forgetting to reload that table view or update that label. The connection between your data and your UI becomes explicit and unbreakable.
Understanding Swift Package Manager (SPM)
Swift Package Manager is Apple's official tool for managing project dependencies. A modern developer should be proficient in using SPM to integrate third-party libraries efficiently, which is crucial for maintaining a clean and scalable project structure.
Gone are the days of manually dragging frameworks into Xcode or wrestling with CocoaPods configurations. SPM brings dependency management into the 21st century. It's built right into Xcode, uses standard Swift syntax, and just works.
But SPM proficiency goes beyond just adding packages. Modern developers understand versioning strategies, how to resolve conflicts, and when to vendor dependencies versus using them directly. They know how to create their own packages, making code reusable across projects.
The real power comes from how SPM encourages modular architecture. Instead of monolithic apps, you build focused, testable modules. Your networking code becomes a package. Your custom UI components become a package. This modularity makes teams more productive and codebases more maintainable.
How to Spot a Truly Modern iOS Developer
When hiring, it's essential to differentiate between developers who are truly proficient in modern practices and those who are still primarily rooted in older technologies.
The challenge is that many developers claim to know SwiftUI or modern Swift, but their actual experience might be limited to tutorials or toy projects. You need to dig deeper to find developers who can truly leverage these technologies to build production-ready apps.
Analyzing GitHub and Portfolios for SwiftUI Projects
Look for recent projects built primarily with SwiftUI. Check their code for best practices, such as proper state management (using @State, @Binding, @ObservableObject) and a clear separation of concerns, often seen in architectures like MVVM.
When reviewing portfolios, pay attention to the details. A modern iOS developer's GitHub should show evolution. You want to see projects that demonstrate not just SwiftUI usage, but sophisticated SwiftUI usage. Look for custom view modifiers, environment values, and preference keys. These advanced features separate developers who've really dug into the framework from those who've just scratched the surface.
Code quality matters too. Modern Swift code should be expressive and safe. Look for proper use of optionals, value types over reference types where appropriate, and protocol-oriented design. The code should read like well-written prose, not like a puzzle.
Don't just look at the latest projects. Check the commit history. How do they refactor code? How do they handle bug fixes? A truly modern developer continuously improves their code, adopting new patterns and APIs as they become available.
Vetting Knowledge of Modern Architecture Patterns
A modern developer should be able to discuss and implement architectural patterns like MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), which works very well with SwiftUI and Combine. This demonstrates an understanding of how to build scalable and testable applications.
But here's the thing—it's not about memorizing pattern names. It's about understanding why these patterns exist and when to use them. A great developer can explain why MVVM works so well with SwiftUI's data binding. They can discuss the trade-offs between different approaches.
Ask them about state management strategies. How do they handle app-wide state versus view-specific state? How do they prevent massive view models? How do they ensure their architecture scales as the app grows? The answers will reveal whether they've actually built complex apps or just simple demos.
Testing is another key indicator. Modern architecture isn't just about organizing code—it's about making code testable. Ask how they structure their code to facilitate unit testing. Do they understand dependency injection? Can they write tests for ViewModels without spinning up the entire UI?
Interview Questions That Separate the Modern Dev from the Legacy Coder
Ask questions like: 'When would you choose to use Combine versus async/await?', 'Describe the difference between value and reference types in Swift and why it's important for SwiftUI.', or 'Explain a scenario where an Actor would be the right choice for managing state.'
The best interview questions reveal not just knowledge, but thinking process. Here are some that really separate the wheat from the chaff:
"Walk me through how you'd build a real-time chat feature in SwiftUI." This question reveals their understanding of state management, real-time updates, and performance optimization. Do they mention Combine for handling the message stream? Do they consider pagination and memory management?
"You've inherited a UIKit app. How do you approach modernizing it?" This tests pragmatism. Do they suggest a complete rewrite (red flag) or a gradual migration? Can they identify which parts to modernize first for maximum impact?
"Explain a time when SwiftUI wasn't the right choice." This is crucial. Modern developers know the limitations of their tools. Maybe they mention complex custom animations, specific third-party integrations, or performance-critical scenarios. The ability to choose the right tool for the job is what makes a developer truly valuable.
Technical depth matters too. Ask about Swift's memory management in the context of SwiftUI. How do they prevent retain cycles with closures in Combine pipelines? When would they use weak versus unowned references? These questions reveal whether they truly understand the platform or just know how to copy Stack Overflow answers.
Conclusion
The iOS development landscape has transformed dramatically over the past few years. SwiftUI and modern Swift features aren't just new toys—they're powerful tools that enable developers to build better apps faster. When you're looking to hire iOS developers, prioritizing these modern skills isn't about following trends. It's about ensuring your apps are built on a foundation that will serve you well into the future.
The developers who've embraced these technologies aren't just keeping up with change—they're positioned to take advantage of whatever Apple introduces next. They write less code that does more. They build apps that are easier to maintain and extend. They can target multiple platforms without starting from scratch.
As you build your iOS team, remember that technical skills are just part of the equation. Look for developers who are curious, who experiment with new technologies, and who can explain complex concepts simply. The best modern iOS developers aren't just coders—they're problem solvers who happen to use SwiftUI and Swift as their tools of choice.
The future of iOS development is here, and it's more exciting than ever. Make sure your team is ready for it.
References
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Posted Jul 6, 2025
Don't get left behind with outdated technology. Understand why hiring iOS developers proficient in modern frameworks like SwiftUI and concurrency is vital for building efficient, future-proof apps.
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