7 Skills Required to Become an iOS Developer

Growing Demand for iOS App Developers

There are many who believe it doesn’t genuinely exist, and others who label it a crisis.The truth is most likely somewhere in the middle, but the numbers don’t lie.

The US market size for mobile app developers, for example, rose faster than the economy generally in the last five years.

This means there is enormous opportunity right now for anyone who wants to pursue a career as an App Developer. An article from spelled the problem out quite clearly when they wrote the following:

The iPhone and iPad are perhaps the two most essential pieces of technological gear built in the last twenty years, and both rely on iOS to act as their operating system. That is why iOS developers are in such high demand. Any firm that wants to reach the tens of millions of customers that use and adore Apple mobile goods needs to have iOS experts in their workforce, and they are now searching far and wide for them. Looking for Hire iOS Developers for your business needs.

So, how does one go about becoming a hireable iOS Developer? To address that question for you, we’ve put together a terrific list

The top 7 iOS Developer Skills!

#1 Swift

Swift is the programming language Apple invented exclusively for generating their apps. This is the language that will be used for all future iOS development. So you have to know it!

Our own experts acknowledge it’s not a “small” language, but you don’t have to know everything to land a junior iOS developer gig. What you must do is ensure that you are comfortable with:

• Basic syntax
• Optionals
• Control Flow (If and Switch Statements) (If and Switch Statements)
• Classes, inheritance & initialization
• Error handling
• Objective-C Interoperability

For individuals with programming experience who wish to become familiar with Swift, check out Udacity’s Swift Syntax course.

#2 Spatial Reasoning

The capacity to conceive in 3-D, and visualize the spatial relations between items, is crucial for successful app developers.

Simply said, when you build interfaces for devices like the iPhone, Apple Watch, or the forthcoming Apple TV, you must be conscious of how consumers will interact with your application. So you need to: \sunderstand the types of controls/inputs accessible (and popular) for the different platforms, and \sbe a user of the devices you’re targeting so that you can reason about them!

While some people may more naturally exhibit this capacity, rest assured it is an acquired skill, and can be mastered with practice, and via developing genuine projects. Read more about UX Designers and their design process.

#3 Design Guidelines

Successful iOS apps are known and praised for being incredibly intuitive. The reason for this is because these apps conform to a specific set of design rules. How data is kept and displayed to the user is managed in very particular ways.

In order to construct your own intuitive apps, you need to grasp and comprehend these design patterns. That’s why, if you pursue becoming an iOS developer through our iOS Developer Nanodegree program, you’ll study key topics like:

• Swift, the programming language used to construct iOS Applications
• UIKit, Apple’s front-end platform for designing quick and sophisticated web interfaces
• Network requests and Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) (GCD)
• Learn about simple persistence, the iOS File System, and the “sandbox.”

#4 Networking

To understand the relevance of networking to app development, first attempt to imagine of an app on your phone that doesn’t interface with the web. Could you think of one? Chances are either you couldn’t, or it took you a long to think of one, because practically every app we engage with talks to the web in some way. For that reason, it’s vital for you to grasp how to send and receive data from the network.

How this is done is through something usually referred to as JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. That could sound complicated if you’re not familiar, but it’s a relatively standard format that’s actually fairly basic. 

#5 Core Data

Here’s what one of our Subject Matter Experts recently had to say about Core Data: “Learning Core Data is like exercising: the first few days feel like pain, but by the second week, you can’t believe you survived without it!”

Core Data is essentially the persistence framework for Apple products. Consider how your data would be lost every time you used an app. This would be akin to the early days of video games, where you had to beat Super Mario Brothers in one run as you couldn’t save progress.

Core Data is the most significant framework for storing data on Apple devices. We’ve got an excellent course on it here: iOS Persistence and Core Data.

#6 Grand Central Dispatch

Grand Central Dispatch, abbreviated as GCD, is what enables you to add “concurrency” to your systems, allowing several processes to perform concurrently with ease.

Why is this important? Our apps accomplish a lot at once: getting data from a network, showing information on screen, reading touch inputs from the user… executing all of these things at one time would place immense load on the user’s phone: it would either run incredibly slowly or crash.

So you need to learn about concurrent programming, so you don’t create crashes! 

#7 Git and GitHub

Effective use of version control is a vital and helpful ability for any developer working on long-lived (or even medium-lived) projects, and is crucial to working with teams. We think this so crucial that we actually teamed directly with GitHub to teach it!

Become An iOS Developer Today!

All of the above abilities are covered in our iOS Developer Nanodegree program which also comes with a variety of projects to provide you hands-on training.

There are several paths to a successful iOS Developer career. 

According to Robert Half Technology “more than 70 percent of firms are implementing some form of mobile strategy, and they all require the tech workers who can get the job done.”

Also read: Understanding What It Means To Be A Web Developer What Exactly is Web Development?