6 Essential Skills of a Successful iOS App Developer

Opting for a career in mobile app development involves high chances of job growth and opportunities, thanks to ever-rising smartphone and mobile app usage. Per the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the job growth of mobile app developers is estimated to be more than 20 percent for the next five years. So what does it take to become an iOS app developer? Let’s examine some of the core skills you need to become a professional developer.

1. Swift

Swift is a powerful programming language owned by Apple for developing mobile apps specifically for iOS platform. This language is now used for all future developments and projects under iOS. Although the language is quite vast, the following subjects are enough to make you grasp a decent understanding of the language and its practicality.

• Basic Syntax
• Control Flow (If and Switch Statements)
• Optionals
• Objective-C Interoperability
• Classes, Inheritance & Initialization
• Error Handling

2. Spatial Reasoning

The ability to think in terms of 3D while envisioning spatial relationships between objects is an important tool for IOS app developers. When professionals develop interfaces for Apple’s products such as iPhone, Apple Watch, Apple TV, etc. they need to self-acknowledge how users will interact with the app. Therefore you need to have a keen understanding of the inputs or types of controls available for different platforms. And you must see the device from the user’s perspective.

3. Design Guidelines

Most popular and successful iOS apps are popular because of their intuitiveness. One of the major reasons is their strict adherence to defined procedures and guidelines. How data is processed and displayed on-screen is treated in very specific ways. To master the art of building such intuitive apps, you need to understand these design guides and patterns.

4. Networking

Before linking networking with app development, come up with an app that has no connectivity with the web. It may be very difficult to name one, as today almost all of the apps interact with web in some way. But, it is important for you to understand the sending and receiving of data over web or networking. For this, you will be need to be familiar with JSON — JavaScript Object Notation. This might seem somewhat complex the first time it’s seen, but it is actually a standard data-interchange format that is quite straightforward.

5. Core Data

Core Data is a persistence framework developed by Apple for devices run on its iOS platform. This framework mainly operates by storing data on Apple’s devices. For instance, if you have ever played old video games such as Super Mario Bros., remember how frustrating it was to start the game all over again the next time you turned it on. This was due to the inability of the machine to save the game’s progress.

6. Grand Central Dispatch

Abbreviated as GCD, this technology, also developed by Apple, allows your app to be “simultaneous” in nature, making it possible to perform a number of operations at the same time. This is immensely important since our highly-populated apps have a number of tasks to undergo such as gathering data from the web, displaying it on-screen, reading the user’s touch inputs on the device and many others. Undoubtedly, this GCD programming makes the device powerful enough to bear such multiple strains without slowing down or crashing.

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