Vetted offshore iOS engineers
Hire iOS developers who ship apps that pass review and don't drop frames
Grape5 places pre-vetted, India-based iOS developers, dedicated to your product, with at least four hours of daily overlap with US hours. They write Swift with SwiftUI or UIKit, own code signing and App Store submission, and profile with Instruments. Grape5 vets, manages, and backs each engineer, with a free replacement if the fit is wrong.
In short
Grape5 places pre-vetted, India-based iOS developers, dedicated to your product, with at least four hours of daily overlap with US hours.
They write Swift with SwiftUI or UIKit, own code signing and App Store submission, and profile with Instruments. Grape5 vets, manages, and backs each engineer, with a free replacement if the fit is wrong.
When to hire iOS developers
- You have a web product and backend but no native app, and you need someone to own the whole App Store pipeline: provisioning profiles, TestFlight builds, privacy manifests, and getting through review.
- Your app is a five-year-old UIKit codebase and you want to add SwiftUI screens incrementally, without freezing feature work for a full rewrite.
- Your feed stutters and the app crashes on older iPhones, and you need someone to profile with Instruments, kill retain cycles, and move main-thread work off the critical path.
- You're adding subscriptions and need StoreKit 2 purchases, receipt validation, and restore-purchases handling that survives App Store review.
How we vet iOS developers
Every engineer we put forward is screened by a senior Grape5 engineer before you meet them. For iOS developers, we look specifically at:
- Memory management: they find and fix retain cycles from closures capturing self, know when to reach for weak versus unowned, and can read an Instruments Allocations or Leaks trace instead of guessing.
- Concurrency: they use async/await and actors correctly, keep UI updates on @MainActor, and avoid the data races that Swift 6 strict concurrency checking now flags at compile time.
- App Store realities: they have handled code signing, provisioning profiles, entitlements, and privacy manifests, and have shipped through review, including recovering from rejections.
- UI performance: they diagnose dropped frames with the Time Profiler, understand cell reuse in UITableView and UICollectionView, and keep image decoding off the main thread.
- Architecture and testing: they can justify MVVM versus a pattern like TCA, structure a testable URLSession and Codable networking layer, and write XCTest coverage beyond the happy path.
Grape5 vs a freelancer marketplace
Grape5
- Who the engineer works for
- Vetted, dedicated, and backed by Grape5 for your engagement.
- Vetting
- Screened by our own senior engineers, code, system design and communication, before you ever meet them.
- Timezone
- 4+ hours of daily overlap with your US working hours, in your tools and standups.
- If it isn't working
- We replace them from the bench, usually within days, at no extra cost.
- Continuity
- The same team, retained and growing with your product.
A freelancer marketplace
- Who the engineer works for
- An independent contractor juggling several clients at once.
- Vetting
- Self-reported skills, a résumé and a star rating.
- Timezone
- Whatever hours the contractor decides to keep.
- If it isn't working
- You re-post the role and start the search from scratch.
- Continuity
- Churn between contracts, the context leaves when they do.
| Grape5 | A freelancer marketplace | |
|---|---|---|
| Who the engineer works for | Vetted, dedicated, and backed by Grape5 for your engagement. | An independent contractor juggling several clients at once. |
| Vetting | Screened by our own senior engineers, code, system design and communication, before you ever meet them. | Self-reported skills, a résumé and a star rating. |
| Timezone | 4+ hours of daily overlap with your US working hours, in your tools and standups. | Whatever hours the contractor decides to keep. |
| If it isn't working | We replace them from the bench, usually within days, at no extra cost. | You re-post the role and start the search from scratch. |
| Continuity | The same team, retained and growing with your product. | Churn between contracts, the context leaves when they do. |
Related roles you can hire
Pre-vetted engineers across adjacent skills, dedicated to your product and your US working hours.
Frequently asked questions
They can own it end to end: code signing, provisioning profiles, TestFlight distribution, privacy manifests, and the review back-and-forth. What stays with you is your Apple Developer account and certificates, so you grant the right App Store Connect roles rather than handing over ownership.
Real devices matter, and we vet for that habit. The simulator misses camera behavior, push notifications through APNs, memory pressure, and how the app actually performs on older iPhones. Your engineer should be reading real device logs and crash reports, not shipping from the simulator alone.
Both. Most production apps are a UIKit and SwiftUI mix, and a lot of the work is safely changing view controllers that predate SwiftUI. We vet for reading and extending an existing codebase, not just greenfield, and match the engineer to your stack.
Your engineer keeps at least four hours of daily overlap with US working hours. That covers standups, live PR reviews, and pairing when a build breaks or a submission gets rejected. Slower pipeline work like builds and profiling continues asynchronously outside the overlap.
Every engineer is dedicated to your product and backed by Grape5. If the fit is wrong, you get a free replacement, so a bad match is ours to fix, not a hole you are left holding. That is the difference from a freelancer who can go quiet mid-build.
Tell us the role. Get vetted profiles.
Send us the seniority and stack you need. We’ll come back with a shortlist of vetted iOS developers who’ve shipped it, and a plan to start in 2 to 3 weeks.