Hire Swift and Objective C Developers

To make a mark in the high-end consumer app market, companies need to have a strong presence on Apple devices – iPhones & iPads, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and Mac PCs. Brands that do not have a presence especially on the Apple App Store for iPhones and Apple TV may lose out on high-value recurring business.

With an appealing, efficient, and functional mobile app, your business can provide you leverage and allow you more effective and direct communication with your customers. A mobile app is also a great means to build and reinforce strong brand loyalty.

Apple has been the pioneer in introducing smartphone technology and has always set the benchmark in great designs, excellent navigation, an unparalleled user experience that all others follow.

The Apple ecosystem provides seamless integration of apps developed for all of its devices. The investment in developing iOS apps can be high, but the higher ROI makes it worthwhile. With the growing number of iPhone users in developed and emerging economies and more people using multiple Apple devices, the growth opportunities are limitless.

With the right skill set, tools, and proficiency in programming languages, iOS app developers can build aesthetically pleasing and highly functional apps leading to more engagement by users and more revenues for your business.

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Programming Languages for Developing iOS Apps

iOS apps are developed primarily in one of the two programming languages supported by the iOS runtime:

• Objective-C
• Swift

Objective-C

Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that is a superset of the C programming language. Until the introduction of Swift in 2014, Objective-C was the standard coding language for macOS and iOS using Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.

The dynamic runtime of Objective-C can access and use code written in C and C++, making its code fast and robust. It inherits the syntax, primitive types, and flow control statements from C but adds object-oriented features from Smalltalk. The language-level support for dynamic typing and binding, object-graph management, and object literals allows dynamic management at runtime, resulting in safer code.

Features of Objective-C:

• Classes are treated as objects.
• Dynamic typing.
• Optional static typing.
• Categories to define and add new methods to classes.
• Message sending.
• Expressive message syntax.
•  Introspection is easy.
• Dynamic run-time to allow creating messages, classes, adding methods to them,    and changing method implementations at run-time.
• Automatic garbage collection.
• Supports C and C++.
• Simplicity with complex features absent from it.
• Access to Apple technologies through iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS SDKs and APIs.

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Swift

Launched in 2014, Swift is a robust, powerful, and intuitive programming language for the entire Apple ecosystem. As the syntax is concise and expressive, writing code in Swift is interactive and fun.

Swift includes many modern features that are long demanded by app developers. Developers can write safer and reliable code while saving time and creating rich app experiences. The code written in is safe by design and runs faster.

It can be seamlessly integrated with legacy Objective-C, C, and C++. With interoperability between Swift and Objective-C, a project can contain code in both languages.

Many Apple developers prefer this language for its powerful features and rich libraries:

• Designed for safety.
• Fast and powerful.
• Simple to learn for first-time users.
• Source and binary backward compatibility.
• Open source.
• Playgrounds and Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) make coding fun.
• Singular cross-platform package manager.
• Objective-C Interoperability with access to Objective-C APIs.
• Expressive syntax.
• Allows declaring tuples and multiple return values.
• Support generics for robust and safe code.
• Built-in powerful and reliable error handling mechanism.

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Differences between Swift and Objective-C

Objective-C was the de facto language for Apple developers until 2014, after which Swift took over. There are many differences between them. While Swift was influenced by Objective C, Rust, Ruby, and Python; C and Smalltalk influenced Objective-C. Swift is a pure object-oriented language with only classes, Objective-C is C with support for classes, so not purely object-oriented. Finally, Swift is optimized to develop apps for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, while Objective-C was designed to be a general-purpose language.

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Roles and Responsibilities of a Swift and Objective-C Developer

The major responsibilities of a Swift/Objective-C developer would be to develop and maintain applications targeting iOS and OS X platforms. The applications would work on multiple devices, including iPhones, iPads, Mac PCs, MacBooks, Apple TVs, and Apple Watches. The primary role would be to integrate the apps with back-end services making them data and feature-rich. The Swift/Objective-C developer would work in a team of highly skilled engineers and designers all working on different modules/layers of the application. The position of a Swift/Objective-C developer may vary depending on their experience, the exact requirements of the project, and various other considerations.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build effective apps for iOS and OS X.
• Ensure the safety, performance, responsiveness, and quality of apps.
• Collaborate with internal as well as external teams to deliver new features.
• Ensure thorough QA by identifying and fixing bugs and removing bottlenecks.
• Follow high standards of code quality, documentation, and versioning to help in organization and automation.

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Required Expertise

Requirements - hard skills

• Proficient in writing readable, maintainable, performant object-oriented Swift and Obj C code.
• Proficient in Swift with Objective-C Interoperability.
• Proficient in Objective-C programming language to maintain legacy code.
• Experience with Apple’s Xcode IDE, Titanium Studio, and iOS SDKs.
• Experience with Frameworks such as Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, OpenGL ES, cocos2d, Unity3D, iPod Touch, etc.
• Experience in connecting Android applications to back-end services using RESTful APIs.
• Proficiency in Presentation and Designing using UIKit, Core Graphics, Core Animation, HTML + CSS.
• Experience with third-party libraries and APIs.
• Experience with iOS frameworks and libraries such as Core Data, Core Animation, Kingfisher, etc.
• Expertise in Storyboards to design and organize navigation flows created using containers.
• Expertise in the use of Location Manager, UI Gesture, and Fonts.
• Expertise in Auto Layout with Interface Builder and setting constraints for great layouts.
• Expertise in Spatial Reasoning think in 3-D and visualize the spatial relations between objects.
• Proficient in handling Grand Central Dispatch to run tasks concurrently.
• Proficient in Apple’s Apple Human Interface Guidelines and design principles.
• Proficient in working with diverse databases like RestKit, Core Data, MySQL, SQ Lite, NoSQL.
• Proficient understanding of Git (how to break and unbreak it).
• Familiarity with RESTful APIs and JSON to connect iOS applications to back-end services.
• Experience with threading, offline storage, and performance tuning.
• Deep understanding of iOS and Mac OS X activity lifecycles.
• Experience with Testing Automation (Unit, integration, E2E, and User acceptance).
• Experience with ARKit 3 and Reality Kit – advantage.

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Requirements - Soft skills/Others

• Taking complete ownership of features, from design to delivery.
• Work as part of a dynamic team with exacting standards, delivering exceptional quality.
• Communicating to stakeholders, including executives, about app development progress.
• Collaborating with development resources (both internal and external).
• Spatial reasoning to provide an unmatched user experience to the target audience.
• Tackle challenging problems and find creative ways to solve them.
• Build new features and directly impact the future of the products.
• Perform code reviews, evaluate implementations, and provide feedback.

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Salary Structure

Salaries for Swift/Objective-C developers vary according to their experience, location, and position. According to market research, it averages between USD 123,000/year, and top earners can earn up to USD 156,000/year. If they complete one or two certifications, they could earn even more when compared to non-certified developers.

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Key Takeaways

• The Apple ecosystem of apps is growing in size with 3x ARPU compared to Android apps.
• Swift and Objective-C developers are crucial to developing efficient, responsive, safe, and appealing apps for various devices in the Apple ecosystem.
• Swift is a modern programming language with optimized features for app development.
• Objective-C is a superset of C programming language with SmallTalk like object-oriented features, making it suitable for app development.
• The rich IDEs like XCode and interface builder make app development in Swift easy, fun, and interactive.
• Swift is an easy-to-learn language that even non-programmers can learn comparatively quickly.

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Industry Expertise

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