Hire the best Objective-C developers

Objective-C is a general-purpose programming language that supports object-oriented design by adding Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It was the main supported programming language for Apple products (e.g., macOS, iOS) until the introduction of Swift in 2014.

How much does it cost to hire an Objective-C developer?

The first step to determining the cost to hire an Objective-C developer will be to define your needs. Rates can vary due to many factors, including expertise and experience, location, and market conditions.

Cost factor #1: project scope

The first variable to consider when determining scope is the nature of the work that needs to be completed. Not all Objective-C projects are created equal. Building a simple store loyalty app will typically take less time than creating an online store with in-app purchases.

Tip: The more accurately your job description describes the scope of your project, the easier it will be for talent to give you accurate cost estimates and proposals.

Cost factor #2: Objective-C developer experience

Choosing the right level of expertise for the job is closely tied to how well you determined the scope of your project. You wouldn’t need an advanced Objective-C developer to perform simple maintenance tasks such as patching your software to keep up with the latest iOS app update. On the other hand, migrating a large codebase for an enterprise app from Objective-C to Swift can be a long multistage process that requires the skills of a senior developer.

Beyond experience level, you also need to consider the type of experience the talent possesses. The following table breaks down the rates of the typical types of Objective-C developers you can find on Upwork.

Rates charged by Objective-C developers on Upwork

Cost factor #3: location

Location is another variable that can impact Objective-C developer rates. It’s no secret that you can leverage differences in purchasing power between countries to gain savings on talent. But it’s also important to factor in hidden costs such as language barriers, time zones, and the logistics of managing a remote team. The real advantage to sourcing talent remotely on Upwork is the ability to scan a global talent pool for the best possible person for the job. Location is no longer an obstacle.

Cost factor #4: independent contractor vs. agency

The final variable regarding talent cost is hiring an independent contractor vs. an agency. An agency is often a “one size fits all” model, so you’ll often have access to a designer, a project manager, an engineer, and more. When hiring individuals you have total autonomy regarding who is responsible for which part of the project, but you’ll need to source each of those skills separately.

The trade-off between hiring individuals vs. hiring an agency is the level of administrative overhead you incur personally in coordinating tasks among all members of the team. Project scope and personal preference will determine which style is a better fit for your needs.

Not using prefixes: Classes, global functions, global constants, and protocols should be named with a prefix starting with a capital letter followed by one or more capital letters or numbers. It’s a cosmetic quirk owed to the lack of identifier containers within the Objective-C language.

To avoid namespace collisions, Objective-C relies heavily on prefixes. This is why many global elements start with NS (e.g., NSString, NSObject). For example, within the Cocoa framework, you use the NS prefix for Foundation and Application Kit, AB for Address Book, and IB for Interface Builder. Note that you do not use prefixes for naming methods or the fields of a structure.

Not practicing type safety: One of the major reasons Apple wants its developers to switch to Swift is that the language enforces type safety. Type errors are a common problem with Objective-C codebases because you have to use null pointers to implement type safety. When you try to call a method with a null pointer nothing happens. The following expressions and lines of code become a no-operation (NOP). At first glance, this might seem fine because your app won’t crash. However, if you’re not careful with how you implement your pointers, you could cause hidden bugs within your code that are hard to trace.

Accepting unknown strings as format strings: One common source of errors, crashes, and security problems is blindly accepting unknown strings as format strings. A good example is when you log a simple string with NSLog. If you neglect to use the format specifier %@, you might receive a string with characters that are interpreted as format strings.

Follow Objective-C naming conventions

As a rule you’ll want to make sure that any code you write will make sense to future developers working off your codebase. The best way to do that is to ensure you follow standard naming conventions for classes, methods, functions, constants, and other elements of your code. You can find naming conventions for a language like Objective-C off Apple’s official documentation.

Take advantage of C++ interoperability

Swift may be Apple’s preferred application development language, but there are still some advantages to using the more forgiving Objective-C. One of these is interoperability with C++ code via Objective-C++. C++ is basically C with classes—it’s lightweight and one of the fastest languages out there. The ability to leverage the C++ ecosystem of libraries is enough of a reason for some to keep using Objective-C with modern iOS and macOS apps.

Leverage Objective-C’s massive library

Objective-C has been around a lot longer than Swift. Initially released in 1984, it offers countless libraries to help developers with their projects. GitHub’s libraries address everything from real-time app analytics to mock objects for test cases to method swizzling. There are also macros, fragments of code that have been around for so long they’ve been named by the larger developer community, that can be used to solve specific problems you might encounter when building Apple apps. Examples of macros include DLog for logging and debugging and Nimble for creating DSLs (domain-specific languages).