How To Become A Senior IOS Developer: What It Is and Career Path

What is a senior ios developer and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

3 min read

Quoted experts

Brian Glas,

Kevin Treu Ph.D.

iOS is the operating system used on Apple's mobile devices, which is why it shares the company's famous lowercase "I." iOS is used to power iPhones, iPads, and other devices. Therefore, senior iOS developers are in charge of developing applications for Apple devices, whether they work directly for Apple or a third-party tech company.

A senior iOS developer is involved with every part of an application's development. They need to know coding languages such as HTML, structures like JSON, and all the ins and outs of the iOS platform. The senior iOS developer doesn't do all this work alone. They usually manage a whole team of developers and make sure that the development process goes smoothly.

There are several paths towards building up the knowledge base that senior iOS developers need to succeed. Many have bachelor's or even master's degrees in computer science. They also require years of practical experience in application development before leading a team of their own.

What general advice would you give to a senior ios developer?

Brian Glas

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Union University

Build relationships: Different technologies will interest and challenge you, but throughout your career, you'll find that it's the relationships that are the most important. This is harder to grasp earlier in your career, but much easier to understand after 15-20 years.
Gain different perspectives: Spend time with people in other roles that your job interacts with, and gain a solid understanding of how they view things; this is most valuable for career progression and understanding of how your work fits into the big picture.

ScoreSenior IOS DeveloperUS Average

Salary

8.1

Avg. Salary $117,121

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

4.0

Growth rate 21%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

4.0

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.17%

Asian 31.93%

Black or African American 4.66%

Hispanic or Latino 8.43%

Unknown 4.87%

White 49.95%

Gender

female 10.40%

male 89.60%

Age - 38

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 38

Stress level

4.0

Stress level is moderate

7.1 - high

Complexity level

7.9

Complexity level is challenging

7 - challenging

Work life balance

6.6

Work life balance is good

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a senior ios developer

Explore senior ios developer education requirements

Most common senior ios developer degrees

Bachelor's

78.2 %

Master's

18.7 %

Associate

2.0 %

Start to develop specific senior ios developer skills

Skills	Percentages
Objective C	10.15%
Objective-C	6.85%
UI	6.58%
GIT	6.08%
Android	3.94%

Complete relevant senior ios developer training and internships

Accountants spend an average of 3-6 months on post-employment, on-the-job training. New senior ios developers learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a senior ios developer based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real senior ios developer resumes.

Research senior ios developer duties and responsibilities

Consult on the database schema, create business environments, write stored procedures in PL/SQL, authore reports and manage security.
Experience in consuming JSON structures to parse data receive from back end developers and using the data in MVC flow.
Design front end with css3 and HTML coding.
Used JIRA for bug tracking / GitHUB for version control.

Get senior ios developer experience

Generally, it takes 2-4 years to become a senior ios developer. The most common roles before becoming a senior ios developer include ios developer, mobile applications developer team lead and java developer.

Prepare your senior ios developer resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your senior ios developer resume.

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