In 2021, thousands of small business and new app creators joined the App Store from all around the world. Of this set of new developers, approximately 24 percent came from Europe, 23 percent from China, 14 percent from the US, 4.3 percent from Japan, and 34 percent from other regions including Korea, India, and Brazil. And over the last two years, the number of smaller and emerging developers joining the App Store has grown — for instance, in the UK, the number of small developers new to the App Store grew by almost 40 percent since 2019, and, in Germany, it grew by over 25 percent. 

The PocketSuite booking and payments app is built to make it easy for service professionals, either solo or with small teams, to run their entire business. From booking clients and managing payments to invoicing and signing contracts, this app does everything right from an iPhone. Co-founder and CEO Chinwe Onyeagoro, a former management consultant who had transitioned to helping small businesses find funding, saw these businesses weren’t growing because they were always short on cash. “I thought, there has to be a better way for service pros to get paid fast and create recurring revenue — so I went back to my roots as a 7-year-old coming up with ways to make money with friends from a lemonade stand to a babysitting club,” Onyeagoro explains. “I wanted to make it easy for anyone, whether they’re an esthetician, dog trainer, home cleaner, or handyperson, to achieve their goal income so they can live a great life.” 

As she shared her vision with her husband, co-founder and CTO Yang Forjindam, they knew they needed a mobile app where professionals who are away from a desk four to five days a week could manage their whole business. Forjindam, who was an enterprise software architect, explains, “I quickly saw that Apple was the easiest platform to develop on,” and taught himself to do so to launch PocketSuite on the App Store in 2016. The team has since become early adopters of technologies like Apple Pay and EventKit that make it simple to offer smart tools to the app’s users. These tools are part of the robust set of technologies Apple provides to help developers of every size create innovative apps, including more than 250,000 software development building blocks (APIs) and more than 40 software development kits (SDKs) to harness the power of machine learning, augmented reality, and other cutting-edge technologies.