Introduction
Businesses know how important it is to stay close to their customers. And the closest thing to customers is their smartphones. Therefore, entrepreneurs are focusing more on building a mobile app to expand their business and keep them close to customers. Smartphones are the fastest way for businesses to increase their reach and eventually boost their sales.
According to research, the mobile app market is expected to generate $935 billion in revenues from paid downloads and in-app advertising by the end of 2023.
Androids and iOS are the major operating systems used in mobile devices, so developers make sure that their mobile app is compatible on both platforms to reach a broader audience. So the developers should be familiar with both these operating system Operating Systems which can tremendously be in their favor.
Top iOS App Development Tools to consider in 2022
1. Swift
Swift is a popular and widely used programming language for iOS app development. It was introduced to the world in 2014 with some powerful advanced features that help developers to code easier and create something incredible. We can say that this programming platform is a successor to both Objective-C and C languages that have low-level operators, and primitives but still provide object-oriented features to boost performance and faster development.
Swift is an open-source platform that allows mobile app developers to build iOS, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. Since it is relatively new as compared to other similar programming languages, it has more advanced functionalities that focus on making the development process easy by allowing developers to write simple code that can be easily read and written. The main features provided by Swift are functional programming, support inferred types, advanced control flow, effective error handling, automatic memory management, and much more.
2. Xcode
Xcode was introduced by Apple to build Swift applications which are originally integrated with the development environment used by Apple. iOS developers highly recommend using the Xcode tool to build applications for iPhone, Apple TV, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch. We can say that it is one of the most effective and powerful iOS development tools available in the market that guarantees you to bring swiftness and consistency to the process of app development.
Xcode was released in 2003 to help iOS app developers reduce the development time and give them an integrated workflow for testing, coding, debugging, and user interface design. Xcode offers features like Objective C compilers, instrument analysis tools, creating customer instruments, the latest SDKs, analysis code, and much more.
3. Parse
Parse server is an open-source BaaS platform acquired by Facebook, released in 2013 to provide a mobile backend as a service. After the hosted services were closed, Parse was open-sourced and has its community forum and documentation. But currently, it has grown and become a strong community that helps programmers to organize and store data in the cloud, run custom code in the cloud, and manage push notifications.
Parse is a powerful tool to consider in 2022 and beyond for iOS app development as it speeds up the pace of software development using various backend tools like identity log-ins, social media integration abilities, creating custom code in the backend, and much more which makes it one of the best iOS tools.
4. Objective-C
Objective-C is a great programming platform highly used by iOS developers to write software for OS X and iOS. It was created in the early 1980s by Brad Cox and Tom Love to write more clear, modular, and cleaner code. It is known as the superset of the C language and offers object-oriented capabilities with a dynamic runtime environment. The structure of Objective-C is similar to that of C which makes the platform easy to learn for those who are already familiar with the C language.
The flow control statements, primitive types, and syntax of C are all inherited by Objective-C which adds syntax for defining classes and methods. Despite this, it adds language-level support and objects literals while proposing dynamic typing and delaying responsibilities until runtime. Data hiding, support for operator overloading, general-purpose language, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, etc. are the key features of Objective-C.
5. AppCode
AppCode is an IDE used by iOS developers for iOS/macOS development that natively supports Swift, Objective-C, C++, C, and many other programming languages via plugins. Basically, it is an advanced tool launched by JetBrains which can be used with numerous languages and this is the main reason why it is popular among iOS app developers.
Do you know that AppCode uses plug-ins? Yes, it used plug-ins to extend its functionality by writing your own plug-ins and interpreting the code easily. This IDE is geared toward catching various coding errors, which allows programmers to resolve issues and save more time. This is known as a code management task where developers develop iOS apps, run, test, and debug the app easily.
6. RxSwift
RxSwift is one of the best and most widely used libraries by iOS app developers for composing asynchronous programming and event-based code. It is a platform that is integrated with the Swift language as it is based on reactive programming. The RxSwift code uses observable sequences and functional style operators for parameterized execution via schedulers.
The asynchronous code represents events as streams of events that have the ability to subscribe to them and apply functional programming approaches which simplify working with complicated events.
7. Jazzy
Jazzy is a command-line tool to produce apple style documentation for Swift or Objective-C. It can easily be installed and used by developers because it has a gentle learning curve and is installed in just one terminal command. As a command-line tool, it uses Clang AST and SourceKit to display that code and generate accurate outcomes. Apart from this, it helps developers to manage all the necessary attributes related to the app and helps them to get familiar with writing certain code.
Software engineers and developers write website code which will be documentation so that the output can be directly installed to the Dash documentation viewer. This tool is highly suggested by developers as it helps them to gain a great level of accuracy through effective documentation.
