Our startup ( Time Atlas Labs ) is still doing an app. We designed it from the start so that we can target it for both iOS and Android, and that necessitated backend that we could reuse. As we wanted deep integration with native APIs, the typical ‘React Native that looks like iOS’ wasn’t really tempting for us, and due to that we settled on stack which consists of (top down): ...
TestFlight TestFlight review process (if any) seems almost instant, even for external use. I am not sure how it exactly works, as there seems to be some optional(?) review stage for external use, but it has never blocked us for any amount of time that I remember. App store review process (iOS) Getting app on the app store, on the other hand, does take some time. All of these are for this year ( 2025 ), and here’s the rough data: ...
I have been looking at how to create an iOS app recently, and more particularly, its backend. SwiftUI as a front-end framework these days is quite lovely, but I am not convinced that Swift ecosystem is really good enough to do backend stuff - either on the device, or especially outside it (although Apple is making baby steps with Embedded Swift). UI on the other hand seems to be the best done with Swift (and notably SwiftUI now). It seems considerably better than Interface Builder based objective C was that I used last time around. ...