Objective-C Developers for the Code You Keep, Wrap or Move to Swift

Objective-C developers at Cortance are iOS and Mac engineers who still ship Objective-C next to Swift. Of the 14 engineers in our network who list Objective-C, 12 are senior, as of October 2026. When you hire Objective-C developers through us, we match on what each engineer did with that code: kept it running, wrapped it for Swift or moved it.

The decision now has a deadline. CocoaPods trunk, the public spec repository behind pod install, stops accepting new pod versions on December 2, 2026, after a test run on November 1 to 7. Existing builds keep working, but no fix or new SDK version reaches an app through trunk after that date. In older Objective-C apps the Podfile is often the oldest part of the build: CocoaPods appears in 7 of the 18 Objective-C projects our engineers have shipped.

Keep, wrap or move: which Objective-C code goes first?

Objective-C code that works and rarely changes can stay where it is. The code your team edits every sprint is the first candidate for Swift. Between the two sits code that Swift calls but nobody plans to rewrite. That code gets a Swift-friendly interface instead: nullability annotations, clear names and a narrow bridging header.

The interface is where mixed apps break. Swift imports an unannotated Objective-C pointer as an implicitly unwrapped optional, so a method that returns nil once a month crashes the Swift screen that trusted it. Marking a whole header as nonnull to silence warnings produces the same crash with a cleaner build log. Serhii B. maintained the Mac and iOS clients of an encrypted cloud file-sharing product, where Swift, Objective-C and Swift Package Manager share one build. Ruslan M. ran the full release cycle of My Diet Coach, an App Store app built in Swift and Objective-C with WatchKit for the Apple Watch. We put engineers with that kind of mixed-target history at the top of a shortlist when a brief mentions a migration.

The Objective-C worth keeping: the seam to C and C++

Objective-C that sits between Swift and C or C++ code is usually the last thing to rewrite: a vendor SDK, a Bluetooth stack, a PDF engine, a game core. Rewriting that layer gains little, because the C++ underneath stays. Severyn K. worked on an Objective-C app that sends label jobs to industrial belt printers, and part of his job was debugging the C/C++ Bluetooth library underneath it. Bugs at that depth surface as crashes in Objective-C stack traces, so the engineer has to read both languages to find them. Cortance matches engineers to this layer only when their project history shows work on both sides of it.

Can an AI assistant translate Objective-C into Swift?

An AI coding assistant can draft a Swift version of an Objective-C class in seconds, and for small leaf classes the draft is often a fair start. The risk sits in what the source file does not say. The assistant cannot know which pointers may be nil when the header is unannotated, or who frees memory passed through a C callback. It also misses methods that another class swaps at runtime through swizzling or observes through KVO. A converted file can compile and still change behavior the first time one of those assumptions fails in production.

The useful split is to let the assistant handle leaf code and keep a senior engineer on everything that touches the runtime or the C boundary. When a client plans an AI-assisted migration, Cortance looks for engineers who have shipped mixed Objective-C and Swift targets, because they know which files to keep away from the tool.

Tell us what is still in Objective-C

Send us the share of the code still in Objective-C, your Podfile, any C or C++ libraries in the build and the platforms you ship: iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch. We shortlist engineers whose projects match that mix, and the one you choose can start within 2 days.