About · Germany / EU
Jan Mensch: Fractional iOS Lead
Sixteen years on the platform since iPhone OS 3. Eleven years freelance. Engagements across premium brands and regulated environments. I'm the interface person between an iOS team, product, design and the executive team.
- On iOS since
- 2009 · iPhone OS 3
- Freelance since
- 2015 · 11 years
- Languages
- English · German
I started writing iOS apps with iPhone OS 3, just weeks before the iPad was presented. Before ARC, before Auto Layout, before Swift. Sixteen years later the platform looks completely different, and yet most of the same questions still decide whether an iOS team is healthy: who owns the release, who feels comfortable with code signing, who can make architectural decisions that stand the test of time?
Since 2015 I've been freelance. Eleven years of one engagement after another with European product teams. Some short, some long, all the same shape: the iOS function inside an organization that doesn't have a permanent iOS lead they can rely on to make the calls.
Premium-brand DNA
The engagements I've built my craft on are with brands where the app is part of the product experience, not a fulfillment channel. Canyon, Audi, Porsche, Red Bull. Brands with very strong opinions about what something is allowed to look and feel like, where "good enough" doesn't make it past the design review. That sensibility lives in the bones of the work I do: small details, restraint where most software gets noisy, animations and typography that feel considered rather than defaulted.
It also lives in my expectation for what an iOS team should produce. The app should feel like it belongs on the platform it ships on.
Regulated environments
A different set of engagements has been in regulated contexts: DAK Gesundheit (German statutory health insurance) and Wiener Städtische (Austrian insurance). The work in those contexts is shaped less by the design review and more by the audit. Data handling has to be defensible in writing. Crash reports and telemetry have to be carefully partitioned from anything that touches personal health information. Accessibility is not a "late add-on" but a hard basic requirement.
Best of both worlds
Most iOS leads who have worked in premium-brand environments have never been close to a compliance officer. Most who have worked in regulated environments have never had to argue with a brand director about easing curves. I've spent meaningful time in both and am able to context switch to the mode that is required by the assignment.
History
The key moments and assignments that shaped my work. Not an exhaustive list.
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2009-2013
iPhone OS 3, first iOS work
First iOS app built with Objective-C for a university project. Enjoying the experience, I joined a mobile-games start-up "nemgo" to build iPhone games.
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2015-2017
Going freelance
Having finished university, I decided to work freelance. First assignments were small apps, habit trackers, internal company workflow apps, leading up to more serious start-up MVPs and engagements with Red Bull.
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2017-2019
Porsche
My first long-term assignment as iOS lead. Building an app from the ground up that focuses on the customer interaction with the brand, the dealerships, the community. A learning curve with branding strictness, enterprise compliance, navigating different team goals within large organizations. Learning to handle a steadily growing team.
See my engagement with Porsche -
2019-2021
kfzteile24
A change in pace, a chance to apply my learnings in a completely new app in a more fast-paced environment. Building an e-commerce app for car parts. Growing a new lead from the inside before handing over.
See my engagement with kfzteile24 -
2021
DAK Gesundheit (German statutory health insurance)
Joined the DAK team to build the section around the bonus program. The work is dominated by processes. Accessibility guidelines, security guidelines, strict QA processes baked into every step. Nothing can be left to chance when it comes to customer health.
See my engagement with DAK Gesundheit -
2022
Canyon
Laying the groundwork for one of the main customer touch points for a digital native brand. Architecting the app with a long-term product roadmap in mind before handing the codebase over to a permanent lead.
See my engagement with Canyon -
2022-today
Loving Travel
Long-term migration of an Objective-C, UIKit, Swift and web-hybrid travel white-label app to a modern maintainable Swift & SwiftUI codebase.
See my engagement with Loving Travel -
2022
Wiener Städtische Versicherungen (Austrian insurance)
A stabilization assignment. Help a team ship a new feature with a sudden drop in workforce that coincides with a project spike. My task: Self-onboard and handle tasks without runway and without blocking the remaining engineers.
See my engagement with Wiener Städtische Versicherungen -
2023-2025
Audi stage
Building an app with a plugin mechanism. Plugins are to be built by different teams. Plugins may move to the main myAudi app later on. Heavy focus on systems architecture across teams, across multiple apps while adhering to enterprise level security and compliance gates.
See my engagement with Audi
Regulated and compliance experience
In practice that means I've sat in conversations with privacy officers about which third-party SDKs can ship in a build, run release approvals that needed a paper trail attached, and made the architectural calls: on-device storage boundaries and encryption, security audits, anonymized analytics. None of this work is glamorous. Most of it is invisible. All of it is what makes an app pass an audit.
Writing & references
Where my thinking shows up.
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Substack newsletter
Essays on iOS leadership, fractional work, and shipping inside European scale-ups.
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Podcast (German, archived)
Explaining app development to potential founders. Touching on basic software engineering, app vs website topics, Apple reviews etc. in a language any non technical person can understand.