Over the course of the last 5 years, Apple has grown its magnitude tremendously. In February 2018, the company’s CEO has issued a press release informing that Apple has distributed over 1.3 billion devices. During the first quarter alone, the company has sold over 95 million devices – 77 million of these were iPhones.

This popularity leads developers to one conclusion – the demand for mobile app design will grow as well. With Google no longer endorsing Android, ecommerce business owners have to re-evaluate their priorities and consider investing in iOS app programming.

There are a lot of iOS developer jobs candidates on the market right now. As a business owner, you might struggle to separate skilled professionals from wannabes. To fish out the best talent from the tech talent pool, you have to know which skills are must-haves in the world of apps before you make a new hire.

If you’re an app developer yourself (especially, a self-educated one), you would benefit a great deal from knowing what skills are necessary to master if you want to come across as the one that knows how to make a mobile app.

In the post, we’ve gathered 5 basic things a junior mobile app developer should get the hang of.

Skill #1. Fluency in Swift or Objective-C

The first step of the professional way of any iOS developer is choosing a primary language – the one you’ll use to perform 99,9% of your projects.

The most common choice is between Swift and Objective-C. Quite possibly, if you’re reading this, you have already meddled with either one or the other. However, we’ll still break down the main differences between the two.

Swift was developed as a replacement for Objective-C. In a way, it has a handful of advantages over the older language: such as the introduction of type safety, advanced string manipulation, or the guard feature that makes the code times more readable.

On the other hand, ObC is more dynamic language comparing to Swift which still makes it the superior one.

While most developers are inclined to think that the future lies in Swift, the choice of iOS programming language is still up to you. There are a few other programming languages to consider – discover this info here. The only thing that’s important is sticking to your primary language to master it in the best way possible.

Skill #2. Good command of MVC

Model-View-Controller is one of the fundamentals of Objective-C programming. Apple chose this pattern as a cornerstone of their apps architecture for a reason. First of all, it allowed a smooth transition from macOS to iOS once the latter has been introduced.

It aligns well with the other goal of for iOS mobile app development – simplicity. After all, it’s exactly what Apple aspires to – making the early stages of development highly manageable.

Here are a few basic things you can do within the framework:

• Reuse and reconfigure View objects;
• Responding to action and delegation messages and managing the cycle of “owned” objects;
• Passing data from Model to Controllers;

Skill #3. Experience with Unit Testing

A major part of iOS apps didn’t go anywhere near unit testing. That’s understandable – the costs of using the method are sometimes too high. After it’s been unit-tested, a code will lose in readability which something a team of developers can’t afford (it’s important that your code is clear for an IT project manager).

However, at a more than few instances in iOS mobile development when you do have to unit test your apps. To name but a few:

• Apps that are developed on data-based logic. If a feature is supposed to be activated after some time, it won’t be easy to test manually. With a unit test, you can be sure new features will be launched when you’ve planned them to.
• It makes sense to unit test apps if manually testing the condition would take a lot of hours.
• You need to test a rare condition. Rather than messing with the original code to see if what you planned appears, it’d be smarter to unit test the condition.

Skill #4. Installing and maintaining in-app purchase

It’s pretty straightforward why the in-app purchase is a trend these days. With the usage of mobile phones and the growth of online purchases both growing by huge numbers, business owners seek monetization by enabling in-app purchases. Firms such as Pangle lets your app thrive in more ways than you could imagine. They could help you gain loyal customers which could in turn help monetize the app.

Looking for a developer, one would expect that a professional is capable of launching the feature. Here are a few types of in-app purchases remote employees should be familiar with:

• Consumable – most notable example of these are game items – those people can purchase, use up, and buy again.
• Non-consumable – a premium feature that’s bought once and forever;
• Auto-renewable – the type Netflix and Amazon use (your subscription renews unless you cancel it);
• Non-renewing – the type of subscription that doesn’t renew automatically unless the user himself chooses to prolong it.

Knowing, at least in theory, how to install these types of purchases will come in handy while looking for an iOS developer job.

Skill #5. Handling MessageUI

Creating even the most basic iOS app, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few UI/UX designer skills. Knowing your way around the MessageUI framework is a way to ensure you’re capable to create and maintain an app that has a messaging feature. It provides view controllers with basic interfaces to plug email and SMS feature into your app.

These interfaces will allow message delivery without making a user leave the app.

Conclusions

• Mobile app development is continuously growing at the moment. A huge number of iPhones distributed and apps installed makes app development a new gold mine of software development – and the product manager salary is promising as well.
• To make sure that a software developer you hire knows his craft well to maintain an iOS application life cycle, you have to look for certain skills in his resume. If you’re a developer yourself, there are a few basic skills that are the first ones to learn.

Fluency in Swift or Objective-C, good command of MVC, and a solid amount of experience with unit testing are crucial. Being able to launch and maintain the most basic features such as messaging and in-app purchases is another skill that will help you survive the competition.