Best Programming Language for iOS App Development
Apple iPhone and iPad products have become the standard of mobile smartphones and tablets. Apple Watch is one of the most-sold smartwatches in the world. All of these Apple devices are powered by Apple’s operating system, iOS.
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If you want to build iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch apps, you need to learn iOS development. In this article, I will discuss the most popular iOS development programming languages and which language you should choose for your next iOS app.
What programming languages can be used to develop iOS mobile apps? Here is a list of the most popular programming languages used to develop iOS apps.
- Objective-C
- Swift
- C#
- Python
- C++
- HTML 5
Objective-C
Objective-C was developed by Tom Love and Brad Cox in 1984. Prior to Apple launching Swift in 2014, Objective C was the primary language of Apple iOS mobile apps. Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that brings Smalltalk flavor to C programming language. Message passing among objects is a key feature of Objective-C that became really useful for Apple iOS operating systems.
Today, Swift has taken over Objective-C in popularity and usefulness.
Objective-C is a superset of the C programming language and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime. Objective-C inherits the syntax, primitive types, and flow control statements of C and adds syntax for defining classes and methods. It also adds language-level support for object graph management and object literals while providing dynamic typing and binding, deferring many responsibilities until runtime.
Swift
Swift is the primary programming language of the iOS operating system. Swift was developed and launched by Apple in 2014. In Dec 2015, Apple open-sourced Swift under the Apache License 2.0. Besides iOS, Swift is also a programming language of macOS, watchOS, tvOS, Linux and z/OS.
Prior to Swift, Objective-C was the primary language for iOS development. Objective C being 30 years old, the language did not support modern needs. Swift is a modern programming language that provides modern language features such as dynamic, safe, late binding, and extensibility.
Earlier in 2018, Swift surpassed Objective-C in popularity and became the #1 programming language for iOS and other Apple operating systems. Swift is a highly recommend language for building your new iOS, tvOS, and watchOS platforms.
To learn Swift, here is a complete training course on Swift.
iOS Development with Swift 4 includes ARKit, CoreML, App Design and much more.
C#
The C# language was created by Anders Hejlsberg at Microsoft and launched in 2000. C# is a simple, modern, flexible, object-oriented, safe, and open source programming language. C# is one of the most versatile programming languages in the world.
C# allows developers to build all kind of applications including Windows clients, consoles, Web apps, mobile apps, and backend systems.
C# developers can build native iOS and Android mobile apps with the help of Xamarin. Xamarin is a tool as a part of Visual Studio which allows developers to write C# code that is compiled to native iOS and native Android binaries. These binaries work exactly as any native app written using other iOS and Android languages, such as Swift or Kotlin.
C# offers developers the ability to build native iOS and Android mobile apps without learning a new programming language.
Learn more about What Can C# Do For You.
Python
Python is one of the most popular programming languages of recent times. Python, created by Guido van Rossum in 1991, is an open-source, high-level, general-purpose programming language. Python is a dynamic programming language which supports object-oriented, imperative, functional and procedural development paradigms. Python is very popular in machine learning programming.
In iOS app development, Python can be used to create libraries, functions, and back end processing tasks.
C++
C++ is one of the oldest and most popular programming languages. In Android development, C++ is used to build APIs and backend tasks. There are several popular built-in C++ libraries available for iOS developers to use in their apps.
HTML 5
HTML 5 combines with CSS and other technologies can be used to build iOS hybrid apps. These apps are not native apps. Hybrid apps wrap around a browser control and use HTML and CSS to render pages within the apps.
Conclusion
iOS is the second most-used operating system in the world behind Android. Objective-C and Swift are two main programming languages used to build iOS apps. While Objective-C is an older programming language, Swift is a modern, fast, clear, and evolving programming language. If you’re a new developer who wants to build iOS apps, my recommendation would be Swift.
Here is a complete course on Swift programming