A Little Bit About Me
Hey! My name is Asad and I'm an iOS engineer based in Lahore, Pakistan, with a soft spot for interface design. Over the last 6 years I've shipped 15+ apps to the App Store for teams in the US, UK, Ireland and Australia, across health and fitness, fintech and payments, offline mapping, encrypted messaging and VoIP, blockchain, social, on-device machine learning and productivity. I like problems where the platform itself is the hard part.
I've contributed to SwifterSwift, written a 243-page book called iOS Development using UIKit that's published on Apple Books, and I build and ship my own apps on the side.
When I'm not on the computer, I enjoy reading, long drives back to my village, and an unreasonable amount of chai.
TL;DR? Self Proclamations:
iOS Engineer
UX Enthusiast
Published Author
What I Do
Design
An app is judged on how it feels long before anyone reads the code. I care about interaction detail, motion that explains rather than decorates, and interfaces that follow Apple's grain instead of fighting it. Most of my work has been on small teams where design and engineering are the same conversation.
Development
Native iOS in Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit and Objective-C, with Kotlin when a project needs Android too. I've owned the whole iOS layer more often than not, which means architecture, Core Data, networking, CI and App Store submission as much as screens. I aim for code the next engineer can read without me.
Involvement
I contribute to SwifterSwift, an open source Swift extension library, and I wrote a book on UIKit that's on Apple Books. I also build my own apps, which is the fastest way I know to find out what I don't understand yet.
Experience
6 years of iOS, and I'm still finding corners of the platform I haven't touched yet. That's most of the appeal.
Some technologies I've worked with:
Swift
iOS
Objective-C
Xcode
App Store
Apple Pay
Firebase
Supabase
Railway
RevenueCat
Stripe
Bitcoin SV
SQLite
CocoaPods
Fastlane
Proxyman
Postman
Mixpanel
Claude
Jira
Git
GitHub
FigmaWhere I've Worked:
Shelly
Gamified screen time
A screen time app with a digital snail whose health improves the less you scroll. Built on Family Controls and DeviceActivityMonitor, entirely on-device with no tracking, and a subscription tier for the full feature set. Ships for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro.
Block
NFC tap to block
A physical NFC tag paired with an iOS app. Tap your phone to the tag and distracting apps lock instantly. The idea is friction: you have to walk to the tag to unblock, which is enough to break the reflex. Core NFC plus Shield Configuration for blocking that actually holds.
Chapter
Replace a bad habit
A habit replacement app built around a credit system: finish something in the real world, earn screen time. Streaks, wellness logging and animated progress, with zero cloud storage so nothing leaves the device.
Bright Start
Circadian rhythm reset
Your apps stay locked until the camera confirms you've been outside in real daylight. Core ML classifies the sunlight, HealthKit tracks the effect on sleep, and a streak keeps you honest. Probably the most fun brief I've had.
Focus Bear
ADHD productivity, Australia
Built for people with ADHD and autism. Morning routines, habit stacking, Apple Watch complications and HealthKit, running across iOS, macOS and watchOS. The blocking had to survive users actively trying to get around it, which shaped most of the architecture.
Athanify
My own app, built solo
An Islamic prayer companion I designed, built and shipped on my own. Prayer times, Qibla, salah streaks, hadith, sleep stories and a Ramadan mode, plus a focus mode that quiets distracting apps while you pray. Subscriptions run through RevenueCat.
Peptify
Health tracking
A health tracker with a two-compartment pharmacokinetic model behind it. 80+ biomarkers pulled from bloodwork by camera OCR or PDF, 30+ body composition metrics, HealthKit throughout, and Live Activities in the Dynamic Island. Local-first, and it runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro.
HiiKER
Offline hiking maps, Ireland
130,000+ trails with offline tile caching, so the map still works where the signal doesn't. GPX import and export, Garmin sync, 3D terrain, weather overlays, and an integration trusted by mountain rescue teams. MapKit, CoreLocation, Core Data and GraphQL.
Going Solo
Social travel
A social platform for solo travellers: trip matching, location-based discovery and real-time chat over WebSockets and Firebase. Most of the work went into making matching feel instant on a bad hostel connection.
Pryvate Messenger
Encrypted comms, UK
A full secure suite: voice, video, conference, messaging and email, built on the Linphone SDK with post-quantum ZRTP for calls. Used in healthcare, legal and enterprise across 50+ countries, so HIPAA and GDPR shaped every decision in the app.
Officetree
Business VoIP
A business phone app: calling, texting and voicemail over PlivoVoiceKit, wired into CallKit so it behaves like the native dialler. Multi-account support, so one person can run several businesses from one handset.
1st-Response
Dictation for first responders
Audio dictation for people who cannot afford a spinning wheel. Offline-first with quick resume so a dropped connection never costs a recording, built on AVFoundation, and it collects no data at all.
Votari
Blockchain election infrastructure
Election infrastructure rather than a voting app. Ballots signed and anchored on the Bitcoin SV blockchain, biometric passport reading on-device over Core NFC, Merkle-tree verification, and cryptographic proofs a voter can check for themselves. Zero-server, and it scales past 100,000 ballots with real-time tallying.
Fonder Cards
An app for couples
A daily shared card for two people, with a WidgetKit home screen widget, mini games and surprise drops. CloudKit keeps both phones in sync, and the whole thing is wrapped with Capacitor.
IDVKit
My own open source SDK
An identity verification SDK that runs entirely on the device. Core ML and Vision handle face matching and liveness, Core NFC reads the e-passport chip and validates the MRZ. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, which is the whole point of it.
Plant Health
My own app, co-founded
A plant care app I co-founded and built. Point the camera at a plant and on-device vision identifies the species and diagnoses disease, with a confidence score and a treatment plan rather than a bare label. Plus a garden score, watering schedules and streaks to keep you honest about the plants you already own.
Get In Touch!
Whether you have an idea for a project or just want to chat, feel free to shoot me an email!