I never thought of myself as a "niche programmer," but, as it turns out, I sort of, am.

I write native UIKit applications, using Swift. No PWAs, no hybrid systems (like React, Electron, or Ionic). I'm pretty good at it. I've been writing Swift, every day, since it was announced in 2014. It's no longer an "edge" language; it is now the baseline, mainstream, native development language for Apple systems, and I'm a fluent speaker.

It means that the apps I write are really small, really secure, really fast, accessible, highly usable, use very few system resources, leverage the latest Apple tech, have almost no external dependencies, work extremely well, and I write them very, very quickly. Also, because they are UIKit, I can get pretty ambitious, as UIKit is a very mature, ship-oriented system. I am looking forward to using SwiftUI, but am yet to be convinced that it is suitable for really ambitious projects.

It's really difficult to find other native Swift developers that work the way that I do. Part of that, I hate to admit, is probably because I'm 60, and I got really sick of sitting in meetups, with a circle of avoidance around me. I have come to understand that I have "cooties." I won't go where I'm not welcome.

But I have also come to realize that an awful lot of apps for Apple systems are written using hybrid systems, and that many folks are unaware that there are Apple app development languages, other than JavaScript.