Apple’s iOS is one of the largest mobile operating systems in the world. Being the 2nd largest mobile OS, Apple’s IOS has a very high adoption rate with over 85% of users on the latest version. When it comes to iOS App development techniques, it is important to follow the best practices to ensure the quality and success of your applications. As the iOS ecosystem is evolving daily, staying up to date with the latest iOS app technologies, trends, and techniques plays a key role in the overall success of iOS app development.
Apple has a stake of 56.81 percent in the US smartphone market. By the end of 2024, mobile apps globally are expected to generate USD 935 billion in revenue. Recently, after crossing the margin of 1.96 million apps on the Apple Store, the urgency for efficient iOS app development is crucially important.
1. Benefits of iOS app development
Using iOS app development services will bring a wide range of benefits to your business. Here is a look at the benefits of iOS app development services:
- You will experience a powerful Apple UI and customized features, enhancing user experience by addressing particular client needs and nurturing a sense of loyalty and value.
- Businesses tapping into iOS app development can aim at tech-savvy demographic people, which helps in expanding their customer base and improving revenue. It strengthens your brand recognition internationally, leveraging the popularity of iOS devices.
- iOS app development offers a strong market penetration. Businesses targeting rapid growth and global expansion can make iOS a perfect choice when it comes to mobile app development because of its widespread consumer demand.
- iOS has a name when it comes to security. It stands out for its unparalleled security than Android. iOS apps offer maximum protection against cyber-attacks or threats. It ensures the safety of sensitive data, which makes it ideal for businesses.
- iOS development can be faster than other platforms because of many factors. iOS gets benefits from Cocoa, Xcode, and iOS SDks, which offer the development of a full-fledged IDE with pre-built libraries and frameworks. The uniformity of the device across the iOS ecosystem streamlines app compatibility and testing procedures. In addition to that, Swift, its native programming language, guarantees seamless compatibility and effective development for iOS devices.
2. 10 iOS development best practices
Check out some interesting and best practices for iOS app development, which are as follows:
1. Begin with the Basic MVP
Using a Minimal Viable Product will help developers test core features early, especially if you start initially. This is how you can save time and cost. You can also identify issues before entering the stage of full-scale development. When you get feedback from early users, it will guide your future iterations and avoid costly changes after the development.
2. Follow the guidelines of the iOS Human Interface
These guidelines involve a set of principles and recommendations by Apple to ensure an intuitive and constant experience across all iOS devices. With these guidelines, developers can create user-friendly and visually appealing apps. While designing an iOS app, layout, color schemes, navigation patterns, and typography must not be ignored to get a seamless user experience. Apart from that, efficient memory management, app performance optimization, and background tasks are other things you have to focus on.
3. Count on Swift and keep yourself updated
Swift seems to be the modern programming language for iOS app development. This language replaces Objective-C. When you rely on Swift, it lets you leverage its powerful features such as memory management, type safety, and enhanced performance. Make sure you stay updated with the latest version of Swift and get the benefit of new language enhancements and features. It would be good if you regularly monitor Apple’s Swift updates and check out the Swift community to keep you updated.
4. Optimizing battery performance
The iOS app should rely on the lowest amount of battery possible. There are some strategies to help you optimize your battery usage in the iOS app, which can improve the user experience. Look at the below-mentioned tips:
- Avoid unnecessary background activity that can affect the battery of the device. Use app background tasks cautiously that may impact on power consumption. Try pausing or minimizing non-essential background tasks. Ensure you perform only important operations in the idle/on standby stage. It will help your app to become efficient and reverent of the user’s device resources.
- Optimizing GPU and CPU usage is essential. If you reduce resource consumption, it can improve your app’s overall efficiency and performance. Relying on optimization techniques for graphics, animations, image processing, and rendering is vital.
- Efficient networking is the next thing to do. Optimizing network requests by decreasing the frequency of updates and utilizing techniques such as batching or delta updates will help a lot. Execute smart catching mechanisms to reduce network usage and enhance app performance.
5. Documentation and Collaboration
Ensure to follow best practices related to collaboration and documentation:
- Writing clear comments and documentation is crucial to explaining the functionality and purpose of your code. It benefits maintainability and team collaboration.
- Conducting code reviews plays a key role in ensuring code quality and sharing knowledge among team members. “Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.” – Cory House. With the help of reviews, you can catch issues early and enhance overall code quality.
- Relying on version control systems like Git will help you in managing changes to your codebase. When you regularly commit your changes and utilize meaningful commit messages, you can do proper management of the changes.
6. Responsive UI Design
It is one of the latest iOS app development practices you need to follow. Creating a responsive user interface plays an important role for an enjoyable and smooth user experience. Use auto layouts to define adaptive and flexible user interfaces that can adjust to different orientations and screen sizes. Utilize constraints to decide on the relationships between UI elements and allow the system to manage the layout adjustments. Next, you can consider size classes to design adaptive layouts. Moreover, Dynamic Type lets users adjust the text size according to their preferences. This is how you can accommodate users with varied visual needs.
7. Implement Continuous Integration and Delivery
CI/CD or Continuous Integration and Delivery is another practice that you can follow for iOS app development. This practice helps modernize the development process and ensures the app’s quality. When you integrate a CI/CD pipeline with the help of tools such as Fastlane, Jenkins, Xcode Server, etc., you can automate tasks like building, testing, and deploying an app to enhance productivity and decrease human error.
8. Testing again and again
Deep or thorough testing is one of the most important elements of the iOS app development process. Under this technique, you can follow some testing practices:
- Unit Testing: Include writing unit tests to verify the behavior of individual components. It ensures code reliability. Use the XCTest framework by Apple for smooth unit testing integration.
- Beta Testing: Include beta testers to gather valuable feedback. This way, you can identify potential issues. There are platforms that can help you with beta testing.
- UI Testing: Automating user interface testing can ensure consistent behavior across many devices and scenarios. Using Xcode’s built-in XCTest framework will give you UI testing capabilities.
9. Keep models immutable
Using this practice for iOS app development will ensure thread safety and prevent concurrency issues. Once a model is initialized, the state of immutability ensures that it cannot be changed. This is how it eliminates the risk of conflicts when multiple threads try reading or modifying the same data simultaneously. Using this approach will improve the reliability and stability of iOS apps, particularly those with concurrent and complex logic operations.
10. Implement Asynchronous Programming
Asynchronous Programming is one of the greatest iOS app development techniques that can be considered. While handling time-consuming tasks like file operations, network requests, or database queries, it is important to asynchronies. There are different asynchronous programming techniques you can follow such as Grand Central Dispatch, Operation Queue, etc.
3. 10 Common Pitfalls to Avoid for iOS App Development
While working on the iOS app development, a lot of developers make some mistakes, resulting in mismanagement and poor performance. It is necessary to go through these common pitfalls, which almost every developer does while designing an iOS app. After understanding them properly, ensure you avoid them:
1. Ignoring App Store Guidelines
Ensure to follow the review guidelines of the Apple’s App Store. If you fail to do so, it can result in rejection. Understanding and following all guidelines will help you avoid delays in your Apple app’s approval.
2. Not Managing App Resources Proficiently
Focus on the proper management of the app resources. Having poor resource management can lead to slow performance and high memory usage. The best way to use the app resources effectively is to optimize images, data storage, and network requests.
3. Avoiding Analytics
Integrating analytics can give you valuable insights into user behavior and app performance. If you fail to get it, you may be missing out on providing the best user experience. There are some productive tools you can use such as Firebase or Apple’s own analytics to get useful data.
4. Don’t skip the documentation
Having proper documentation for iOS app development is crucial for maintaining the quality of codes and ease of future development. With the right documentation, you can easily work on the project and even future developers in an effective way because everything is mentioned systematically.
5. Overcomplicating Features
Sometimes, iOS app developers add too many features or overly complex functionality; it is not easy for your app to work. Moreover, it can also make your app difficult to use and maintain. So, the best thing to do is to aim at the core functionalities of the app and deliver them well.
6. Undervaluing Maintenance
Post-launch maintenance plays an important role in the app’s success. Ensure you regularly update your iOS app to fix bugs and address security vulnerabilities. Regular updates will also help you to add new features.
7. Insufficient Error Handling
Another common pitfall that you need to avoid when it comes to iOS app development is error handling. Proper error handling is essential for a smooth user experience. Make sure your app gracefully manages unexpected situations. This is how you will receive meaningful feedback.
8. Not Testing on Real Devices
These days, a lot of developers are using simulators to test the performance of the app and address if there are any bugs. Of course, simulators are useful. But if you conduct testing on actual devices, it is helpful in different ways. Real device testing is critical to identify issues that might not look like in a simulated environment.
9. Neglecting Device Compatibility
While designing an iOS app, make sure your app works across a range of different devices and screen sizes. Conducting the testing procedure only on the latest devices is the key to avoiding issues for users with older hardware.
10. Overlooking User Experience (UX)
Avoid compromising on the user experience while working on the iOS app development. If you have a poorly designed UI/UX, it may frustrate your users and push them to give negative reviews that you cannot afford at any cost because it will destroy your brand’s or business’s image.
Conclusion
In recent times, it is not an easy thing for any business to enter the digital world and grow instantly. Businesses need something unique that can help them stand out in the huge crowd. iOS app development can bring wonders to your big venture, taking user experience, enhanced cash flows, and customer success to other heights. By following the above-mentioned best practices and avoiding common pitfalls, businesses can achieve success in the iOS app development process.
