Being an app developer is a very good profession. It pays quite well. Recent reports from Statista indicate that Apple Inc. has paid more than USD$ 200 billion to iOS developers in the United States, India and other countries for creating & selling apps and other software made using the best programming languages and sold through the App Store.
The figure is astonishing, isn’t it? Of course it is. Statista’s report is definitely legit and is able to attract a lot of aspiring developers to go for iOS.
Those who are dreaming of becoming iOS developers, are studying computer science to become an iOS developer one day; they should know that they have made the right choice and have entered the right field.
However, there is a slight catch. Do aspiring developers know which iOS programming language they should know about, and should learn? If they’re not sure, they shouldn’t worry. For we lead developers at a well known mobile app development company based in downtown Hamilton have it covered.
In this article, we are sharing the top development and programming languages best suited for iOS app development along with their features, benefits and drawbacks. With out any delay, let us now read about them.
The top programming languages for iOS app development that are must for aspiring developers to learn
Here are the languages aspiring iOS developers must learn as they are among the best languages for iOS app development:
Swift
A handful of surveys indicated that Swift is the most preferred language of iOS developers. It is also among the most trendy languages for creating native iOS apps. Among its features are user-friendly syntax, quick coding style and safe data storage. It naturally also removes unsafe code for a completely secure coding environment.
Key features of Swift are as under:
- It does not need an individual library import for functionality support.
- Provides quick access to incumbent Cocoa frameworks.
- Follows functional programming patterns, like maps and filters.
- It has short and to the point iteration over a vast collection.
- It provides tuples to save various items in a single variable as well as in multiple return values.
Now here are its pros and cons.
- Easily readable thanks to the straightforward nature of its syntax.
- Presence of robust typing and error management functions helping reducing crashes and coding errors by a considerable margin.
- Can be easily incorporated with Objective-C.
- The only drawback is that it has a lack of support for previous versions of iOS.
Objective-C
Objective-C is an object-centric programming language. It is the first one to develop apps for numerous Apple devices (like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV). It is quite a mature and developed language that you can count on to create heavy apps.
Here are its features:
- A metaclass is automatically created and easy to manage during run time.
- It has dynamic typing, which announces a variable holding reference to an object.
- Provides Smalltalk style messaging, making it simpler to understand the language.
- Offers the automatic garbage collector.
Here are its pros and cons:
- It is easy to connect.
- Uses private APIs (application programming interface).
- More steady and stable in comparison to Swift.
- High compatibility with libraries of C+ and C++.
- However, it has complicated memory management, which needs to be understood by C and Smalltalk.
The best languages for developing Hybrid iOS apps
Hybrid iOS apps are fun because they not only run on both iOS and Android but also allow other programming languages to be used for iOS app development. Here are the languages best suited for the latter purpose:
C++
C++ is an extension of the C programming language and is one of the best programming languages to learn. It is a flexible language making it easier to create various operating systems, for game development and for creating browsers. Developers can hence effectively control usage of system resources and memory when creating a simple iOS app.
Here are the key features of C++:
- C++ is a high-level programming language.
- Provides a library rich in in-built functionality accessed by suitable header files.
- It is platform independent and allows using the same piece of code in various environments.
- It offers dynamic memory management plans and supports dynamic memory allocation.
Here are its pros and cons:
- It has full control over memory management.
- Can run on small and large sets of data.
- It enables running the same program on multiple operating systems and interfaces.
- Misuse of pointers may cause the system to crash.
- In-built threads are not supported.
- Security problems in it are present because of global variables and pointers.