Top iOS App Development Tools & Software
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.
There was a time when mobile app development was known as one of the most challenging tasks due to the limitations of Apple. But as time passes, things are getting better. Apple has launched various advanced tools and technologies that make the process of iOS app development easier for developers for its different platforms.
In this quickly evolving technology sector, the demand for software is increasing and businesses are looking for ways to gain the benefits of well-designed and well-executed apps. From startups to enterprise-level organizations, high-performance iOS applications are helping them with considerable advantages.
So if you are planning to develop an iOS app for your business, then we would like to share a list of best iOS development tools used by skilled iPhone app development that gets approved and published on the Apple store in one-go. So without any further delay, let’s get to work!
Top 20 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.
8. AlamoFire
AlamoFire is a popular library used to develop amazing iOS applications. It is an HTTP network-based platform that manages all the web requests and responses in iOS and macOS. It provides an interface apart from Apple’s networking stack and simplifies the common networking operations. This excellent library has now addressed new functionalities and features named as AlamofireImage and AlamofireNetworkActivityIndicator.
Despite HTTP methods, it also possesses JSON parameters, authentication services, and much more.
9. CodeRunner
CodeRunner is an efficient iOS mobile app development tool that developers highly prefer to build sophisticated and dynamic applications. It is an open-source and free question-type plug-in for Moodle that allows app developers to run program code in many different languages. It supports a variety of programming languages which is why it is a versatile and widely used tool by developers. Apart from this, software engineers use this lightweight tool to debug the code and it performs well.
10. Flawless
Flawless is an app design tool used by iOS developers to perform a variety of tasks like iOS app design, comparison, app design execution, and analysis. It allows developers to generate dynamic designs, animations, and capture animated screenshots because it is integrated with Xcode. This is the main reason why developers highly prefer using Flawless. Apart from this, it supports Zeplin files and Quick hotkeys to make the process of app development smooth and easy.
11. Transporter
The Transporter is one of the most popular iOS app development tools used by software engineers to directly deliver content to Apple. You just need to drag and drop your Apple content into Transporter to get started and it becomes easy to send apps, movies, music, books, or shows on the various Apple platforms.
12. Fabric
Fabric is one of the best iOS app development tools that makes it easy for developers to develop highly scalable and sophisticated dynamic iOS apps according to the user’s requirements. This platform is made of three modular kits and overcomes all the challenges that developers face. You can also create a wide range of applications in real-time using the Fabric tool having all the advanced features to automate the deployment process.
Developers can easily add the latest features and functionalities to their iOS applications because Fabric is a lightweight tool that helps you to manage your SDKs and test code snippets.
13. Applyzer
Applyzer is a tool that allows you to monitor the app ranking on the Apple store. You can also monitor various keywords used in the app content with their outcomes and enable keyword search options.
14. RayGun
Raygun is a cloud-based platform that generates crash reporting and monitors the performance of your iOS applications. It is entirely composed within Objective-C and can be used with both Swift and Objective-C products. You’ll be surprised to know that it supports more than 30 programming languages and frameworks, which makes it a great tool that is in high demand.
15. Design+Code
Design+Code is a tool that provides educational videos based on iOS app development and helps developers to enhance their skills which leads to faster results. It has a wide range of video variety where all the content is based on iOS app design and coding. We can say that it is a complete knowledge-based platform that allows developers to create highly efficient iOS applications.
16. Apple Pay
When a customer purchases anything, they can use Apple pay to make payment where the software uses a device-specific number to generate a unique transaction code. Here your card number is not stored anywhere hence we can say that it is a secure way to make payments. When you pay using card numbers, your purchases stay private and you’re not required to enter the credit card details manually. All these details are stored securely within the Apple Pay system which can be executed in just a single click and improve the overall customer experience.
17. Dash
Dash is a Code Snippet manager using which developers can generate their own documentation sets and gain access to 200 APIs in offline mode. You can use ready-to-use doc sets depending on your requirements and even download them. If you’re using this tool for iOS app development, then you can also integrate your app with multiple third-party sources and plugins.
18. Cocoapods
CocoaPods is a dependency manager tool that helps iOS developers streamline your integration of third-party libraries and covers macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS development into your Xcode projects. It is used by more than 80,000 developers and integrated into more than 3 million apps. Cocoapods is entirely written in Ruby and distributed through RubyGems.
19. Peckham
Peckham is one of the most practical plugins for Xcode that add and import statements owing to an auto-complete feature. Using this feature of Peckham, developers can add and import everything into the code using keyboard shortcuts. You can find a variety of Xcode plugins in the market, all of them have advanced and functional features.
20. Simulator
Lastly, we have a simulator which is the best iOS development tool highly used by developers to test their applications before sending them to Apple for approval. Basically, it is an Xcode tool installed on your Mac and it works great for quick testing of your application.
Conclusion
So our list of top iOS development tools ends here. We have shared almost all the essential tools and their information so that you can select the best tools for your project as per your requirements. The tools that we mentioned in this post are powerful and they will help you to build smooth, dynamic, and reactive iOS applications.
In case you need any help from experts to develop a high-performing app, then get in touch with the best iOS mobile app development company and start your project ASAP!
Thank you!
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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…
Charles RichardCharles
Richard[email protected]ContributorC Rich is a Technical Business Analyst at TatvaSoft.Area19Delegate