Abstract

What happens when your user base doubles year after year, your company almost triples in size, and your iOS app has to keep up with it all? At Yoto, an audio platform for kids, we’ve been riding that wave, and it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

In this talk, I’ll share the growing pains of scaling both an iOS app and the team behind it. From monolithic beginnings and “just ship it” hacks to modularisation, improved CI/CD, and building an iOS chapter, I’ll cover the hard lessons we learned along the way. We’ll also look at what we can expect in the future and how we’re proactively preparing for it.

You’ll hear about the technical challenges (offline downloads, CarPlay, in-app purchasing), the human challenges (avoiding silos, maintaining quality, empowering engineers), and how we adapt to massive seasonal traffic spikes around Black Friday and Christmas without burning out.

Whether you’re an indie developer preparing for growth, or part of a larger team wondering how to keep moving fast without breaking everything, this talk will give you practical insights into scaling code, people, and processes… without losing your sanity.

Niamh Power, Tech Lead @ Yoto

Niamh is a Tech Lead at Yoto, a UK-based startup bringing the magic of audio to kids. With over a decade of iOS development experience across multiple industries, she’s passionate about sharing practical lessons from the trenches. Now a hands-on manager, she balances leading the iOS chapter with guiding a cross-functional team focused on improving content discovery on the Yoto platform. Based in North Wales, she spends her free time mountain biking, hiking, and exploring the outdoors with her four-year-old son.