I recently released Atlas Fury, an arcade style space shooter for iPhone (App Store) and Android (Google Play)
so I am jotting down post experiences.
My experience with Godot in general has been pleasant. With iOS? Haha, no. Compared to Android, yeah definitely no. Remind ourselves that Godot is open source and you are allowed to be critical of it's current state.
Plugins
1. You need to have the whole Godot project in order to compile one or so plugins. Compared to Android, this is horrible.
2. Plugins repo is unmaintained. You need to make your own repo and pull in other people's pull request.
3. Because it is unmaintained, you will have to implement features you want to taking away time from your game.
Debug
1. You cannot debug. There's no one click deploy. This is being worked on, but currently if you develop, sucks for you. Back to print() statements. This sucks especially for developing an iOS plugin.
2. You have to profile using XCode and hope your have enough experience to understand where your issues might lie based on assumptions about how the engine works.
Performance
1. If you spawn too many nodes, the fps drops a LOT. More than Android phones. An iPhone 15, Pro, Pro Max should not be outperformed by a Pixel 6! This problem caused me to back off from using more effects. I used to have a hit effect for the widget gun, but because of slowdowns especially in late game, I had to remove it to make sure FPS would be good enough. I thought about adding a setting to remove particles and other graphics, but how much patience are people going to have to want to do that for a game you play in short bites.
2. UI nodes causing high energy impact!!! doing nothing!!!
I have a whole article on Godot 2D Mobile Optimization so I will not spend time on this.
Stability
I blogged about some of mobile issues.
Thoughts
If I had to say which engine you should start with as a beginner then go to Unity or Flutter Flame engines and release a mobile version. App Stores want stability and will fk you you off the store if the app is too buggy esp compared to peers.
Godot is great for intermediates and advanced users when it comes to mobile games. If you can get away without using plugins and doing big things then it will work.
Atlas Fury works out because I have the experience, money and time to spend on it to get it where it is and where it can go. Most will not.
Just because Godot is open source doesn't mean everyone should contribute to it in the form of code. There is a lot of experience before hand before you can contribute to it.
Anyway, keep making games in whatever you want and then deal with the issues with your time and energy. Hopefully, they don't sap away from your energy to make games.