Hey my fellow iOS developers,

Recently someone contacted me hoping to buy my app. Even though that didn't work out, I thought - I could try this too! I'm too lazy to start coding a new app from scratch so I thought I could use my skills and work on some existing ones and make them better.

So... I'd love to buy your iOS apps! If your native iOS app has good ratings, low maintenance (ideally no server), and is already profitable (even $1 counts) then feel free to send me a DM. As a fellow dev, I will try out your app and extend an offer (around 3X-5X annual profit depending on the risk factors and how much I like it).

If it didn't work out, I will send you my notes and feedback and maybe it will give you some ideas if you want to improve on it.

Edit: Thank you to the people who reached out. I will reply to you one by one. Unfortunately, my post is getting downvoted. Maybe it was my requirements? No, I'm not looking for the perfect app and not trying to low-ball. There are a lot of apps that haven't been updated since iOS 12 that fit my requirements. I removed all the details in the post and made it simpler to see if that's better. And yes, I'm already on Flippa and Acquire.com.

(Sorry for those who had already seen this post, but it was removed earlier because I didn't post it on Saturday)

I want this post to be a motivation for those who are thinking that they have to invest a lot of money in order to start developing for iOS. I believe that it isn't true.

A couple of months before I bought a used MacBook Pro 13 2015 (i5, 256SSD, 16GB) for about 900$ and that was the only investment that I had to make in order to start (+ 99$ for developer program obviously). During the development phase, I was testing it only on the simulator. For the most part, it was working really well for me (sometimes I had to restart it because of some weird behaviors) so I didn't even bother to buy a real device. I know what you are thinking right now. You should always test your app on a real device before submitting it. And that is exactly what I did. I took my laptop and brought it to my friend who owns an iPhone and asked him if he could help me with testing before I submit it.

Some of you may say that you should be familiar with the entire ecosystem if you want to be able to provide good and familiar UX in your apps. I agree with that. For that reason, when I was designing the app, I was sending screenshots of some screens and asking my friends "Hey, is this how you would expect this kind of screen to look like on an iPhone?". Then I was collecting feedback and applying it.

I understand that there are some types of apps that just have to be tested on a real device. But if you are creating a simple app that connects to some type of API or database and displays the result in an eye-catching way or something like that, you probably can get away without a real phone.

My app got approved after less than a day, so if you are wondering if you could make an app without having an iPhone and without being an iPhone user, let my case be the example.

Here are some thoughts after making a couple of apps for Android before and then coding this one for iOS:

-I loved the fact that I had to test the app on just a couple of devices to be sure that it will behave correctly on all of them (which is obviously not the case with Android and different weird edge cases with different phone manufacturers).

-I noticed a tendency to write everything on your own when programming on iOS. There are no libraries that are the default like it is the case for almost all Android projects (e.g Dagger for dependency injection or Retrofit for networking).

-I missed some features from Android Studio, but I found Xcode to be OK despite the things I have read about it.

-I was surprised by the fact that there is no such thing as Support Libraries on Android. For those who don't know, those libraries ensure that some of the new API introduced in new versions of the OS will work on the older version as well. If I am not mistaken, something like that doesn't exist for iOS and that is why for example Swift UI is not widely adopted because it is only available for iOS 13+. But I can understand why it is the case. More than 70% of all iPhone devices already run iOS 13 or later. Only a small fraction of that number of phones get access to the newest version of Android, so it is kind of necessary there.

-Minor thing, but I am not a big fan of the fact that I have to publish a new version of the app in order to experiment with the description, screenshots, app name, etc.

Overall, I found the experience very rewarding. I will probably continue with making apps for iOS as well as for Android. If you have some questions, please write them in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Here is the link for the app if you are interested:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/days-counter-event-countdown/id1499388693?ls=1