The OP makes a surprising amount of progress. As other comments note, it's easy to get caught in the weeds of Apple API's and tooling, but AFAICT they generall

The OP makes a surprising amount of progress. As other comments note, it's easy to get caught in the weeds of Apple API's and tooling, but AFAICT they generally do as good as possible at the hard problem of compatibility. The worse problem is that you will get blocked after significant investment. It's because of Apple's scale and focus. They have millions of developers, but only about a thousand really significant ones driving the latest APIs. To avoid delay and noise, Apple ships and demos the happy path, but fails to warn about all the surrounding pitfalls. You will hit one, sooner or later. And any pitfall can be a complete blocker. Unlike web, enterprise, or back-end work, where Java, python, and javascript/typescript libraries and apps are readily available in open-source, bugs present as inscrutable binary blobs that are mostly ignored in the black hole of feedback assistant unless you have some real pull. It's easy to get started as a solo, but to manage the infinite space of mine fields, you'd need to be in a large organization where people have learned where not to step.