To add user profiles to an app, first decide what you may ask for.
To add user profiles to an app you need three pieces: a record attached to the signed in user, a screen that shows it, and a form that writes changes back. With accounts already working, that is a day or two of build. This page assumes you have handled adding user login first, because a profile with nobody signed in is just a settings screen.
The honest limit belongs at the top. A profile is cheap to build and expensive to get wrong, because every field is personal data you then have to display, let people correct, and delete on request. Most of the real work is choosing what to ask for, not writing the form.
See which fields have to be optionalThe short version
The form is a day of work. The field list is the decision.
One record and two screens. A profile row keyed to the user id, a view screen that shows it, an edit form, and a save that writes back. None of that is new work if you have built a form before.
What is new is that you are holding personal data on someone else's behalf. Apple's review guidelines already draw the line: basic contact information such as a name and an email address may be requested only when the request is optional and no feature is withheld from people who skip it. Treat that as the design rule rather than the legal minimum, and most of the field list decides itself.
Which fields you are allowed to require
Start from the platform rules, not from a design file. Apple's App Store Review Guidelines state that apps may not require people to enter personal information to function, except where it is directly relevant to the core functionality of the app or required by law. They add that basic contact information, a name and an email address for example, may be asked for only when the request is optional and features and services are not conditional on the answer.
In practice one field is genuinely required, and it is usually whatever your login already produced. Everything else starts blank. The test that keeps forms short: a field is required only if you can name the feature that breaks without it, in one sentence. A display name passes when other people see content you wrote. A date of birth passes when you gate something by age. A phone number almost never passes.
The same guidelines tie account creation to account deletion. If people can create an account inside your app, you have to offer account deletion inside it too, and the profile screen is where they will look for that button. Build the delete path in the same week as the sign up path. Retrofitting it means hunting down every table that quietly holds a user id.
Apple App Store Review Guidelines, 5.1.1 Data Collection and Storage
Try it
Mark up your profile fields
A field is required only if you can name the feature that breaks without it. Everything else is optional, or should not be there at all.
2 required, 4 stored
More than one required field is a sign-up form people can fail. Check that each one blocks a real feature. You are holding 4 pieces of personal data, and every one of them has to be editable and deletable by its owner.
What the profile screen actually holds
Two screens, not one. The view screen answers who this person is here and what they have done. The edit profile flow is a plain form with a save button. Merging them gives you a page that is permanently half in edit mode, and every state bug lives there.
Keep the profile apart from settings. Notification toggles, theme and sign out are app settings. A display name and an avatar are things other people may see. Plenty of products put both behind one user account page, which is fine as long as that split survives inside it. With no rule about it the two lists drift together, and then nobody can find anything.
The avatar is the expensive field. It is not a text column. It needs a picker, a permission prompt, a resize, somewhere to put the file, and an answer for the day somebody uploads something you would not want shown. That is its own piece of work, covered in add photo upload. Until you need it, initials in a circle look deliberate and take ten minutes.
Design the empty version first. A new profile has a name and nothing else, and that is the state most of your users will be in on day one. If the screen only looks right when every field is filled, it is the wrong screen.
A real name field is a decision, not a default
Most profile forms open with first name and last name, copied from a form somebody wrote decades ago. The W3C's guidance on personal names around the world sets out why that shape breaks. In parts of Southern India, Malaysia and Indonesia many people have a given name and no family name at all, so a required family name field is a wall. Where the family name is written first, the labels themselves mislead.
The practical advice from that page is to take the full name as one field wherever you can, stored as the person typed it. One box is right more often than two boxes you keep patching. If you truly need the parts, ask for them as separate questions and never derive them by splitting on a space.
Then ask whether you need a legal name at all. A display name is what other users see and can be anything. A legal name is for payments, tickets, age checks and contracts. If none of those apply to your app, you are collecting a sensitive field in order to say hello. Two fields, both optional except where a specific feature needs one, is the honest version.
Where the profile lives, and who can read it
Your login provider holds an identity, not a profile. It gives you a user id, an email address, sometimes a name, and maybe one slot for extra data. The moment you want a bio, a city or a preference, you want your own record keyed to that user id. Where that record lives should be decided against the rest of your data, which is what mobile app database design is for.
One profile, several audiences. The owner sees everything and can edit it. Another signed in user sees a subset. A stranger with a link may see almost nothing. Store the data once and decide visibility when you read it. A separate public copy of a profile goes stale the first time somebody changes their name, and you will not notice for months.
That subset is where profiles turn into a permissions problem, and it gets deep fast once there are moderators, team owners or blocked users. We stop at the edge of it here. The rules for who may see a profile are worth settling before you write the first query, not after.
What each approach to profiles gives you
| Approach | Fields you choose | Avatar upload | In-app account deletion | What it costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No profile, settings on the device | No | No | nothing to delete | an hour |
| Whatever your login provider stores | a fixed few | No | their screen, not yours | half a day |
| A profile record you own | Yes | No | you build it | about two days |
| A profile record plus a file store | Yes | Yes | you build it | about a week |
| A user management platform | the vendor's set | Yes | Yes | a fee per user, monthly |
Building the profile into an app you own
Nobody builds an app because it needed a profile screen, so the useful question is how little you can get away with. Apple says plainly that an app without significant account based features should let people in without a login. If your users never see each other, a settings screen and an email address may be the whole answer. If they do see each other, you need a profile record and you need to decide the field list on purpose.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe the app in plain English and it writes a real React Native and Expo project you own, runs it on a cloud iPhone or Android simulator while it builds, and ships to TestFlight and to Google Play internal testing. It is $25 a month and there is no free plan. It does not pick a backend for you, so the store behind the profile stays your decision. Describe the profile in the same breath as the rest of the app: the exact fields, which are optional, who can see each one, and a delete account button that really removes the rows.
Then read the generated code, because this is a screen where reading it pays. Check that the edit form does not overwrite fields it never loaded, which is how a bio disappears when somebody changes a name. Check that a failed save keeps what the person typed instead of clearing the form. The project comes out through two way GitHub sync from the Deploy tab, or as a ZIP, so you can take that review into your own editor.
Questions people ask about adding user profiles
Create a record keyed to the signed in user, a screen that displays it, and a form that writes changes back. With login already working, that is one to two days of build. The longer job is choosing which fields you are entitled to ask for, and building the account deletion path at the same time as the sign up path.
Describe the profile your app actually needs
Write down the fields, which of them are optional, who can see each one, and what deleting an account has to remove. Then build the app around that list.
Start building