Custom iOS Mobile App Development: Best Practices and Tools
iOS mobile app development provides you with a huge audience since as for the fourth quarter of 2022, iOS has 27.5% of the mobile OSes market share. And you’d better not miss it.
As a development company with >12 years of experience and 250+ launched apps, we at Surf have accumulated a decent expertise and worked out iOS app development practices that help us build applications millions of people love. Today we’ll share them with you in order to help you successfully enter the market of m-commerce, online banking, virtual healthcare or whatever you’re headed to.
What is special about iOS mobile app development?
The peculiarities of iOS app development come from Apple’s quite strict requirements to both the technical part of the application and the design for release on the App Store. In general, these requirements are interconnected. Therefore it is essential to take care of the specifics in advance in order to pass the App Store verification. For instance, you won’t succeed if your application doesn’t comply with security standards, has a poor interface, bugs, etc. Let’s take a look at what can help you with that.
iOS app development tools
Of course, a true professional can develop a good app with bare hands. However, this way it will take much more time and effort and the result will be of questionable quality. Our iOS experts shared a list of software they use for most of the agency’s projects and which allow our team to deliver top-notch apps faster.
- Bundler
It allows developers to get the same environment to run the project on any developer’s machine, which speeds up development and reduces bugs related to different environments and library versions.
- SwiftGen/SurfGen
SwiftGen helps generate type-safe access to resources like images, fonts, colors and so on. It greatly accelerates completion of monotonous but time-consuming tasks like changing colors of elements or icons substitution. SurfGen is our own set of libraries for generating code for network-services that speeds up the development process by 3-4 times.
- Swiftlint/SwiftFormat
They help follow the adopted code style and provide the project consistency. All of these reduce expenses on the development and maintenance of the codebase.
- Fastlane
The tool is used within the CI/CD process for pull requests quality control and to automate the creation of an application build through TestFlight and AppDistribution. It provides high-quality code as well as saves development time.
The process of developing iOS apps
Let’s assume you’ve already set your business goals, target benchmarks, maybe have some design concepts and a draft list of app features. What’s next?
Choosing the development team
Choosing the right contractor is the next step. Finding people who know your industry and with whom you mesh in terms of vision, working style, and degree of perfectionism is crucial whether you’re seeking in-house developers or want to work with an agency.
Our broad cross-industry experience in developing custom iOS apps helps us deliver thought-out apps that combine innovations with time-tested mechanics and match market specifics. Among our clients are Burger King, SBI bank, SAP and others.
Researching and planning
Around 95.4% of mobile iOS apps get abandoned by day 30. Poor user experience and ignoring competitors’ practices are among the causes. A thorough research with a well-thought-out plan is half the battle.
We at Surf provide our clients with a detailed product development roadmap which consists of the stages and timeframes, a prioritized backlog. It is derived from a meticulous examination of the market and the сlient’s audience. We seek to take into account as many market and consumer needs as possible and provide all user scenarios. For instance, we handled the requests and expectations for family banking in the UX of the application for a SBI bank.
Development of iOS app
We imply development in a broad meaning as a process that spans design and technical aspects i.e. back- and frontend creation. It’s crucial to take into account the potential application load, design infrastructure and architecture that will be able to handle it, make sure back and frontend match with each other and thoroughly test the application.
Maintenance
Even after your application is out, development continues. It’s crucial to stay on top of market emerging trends, as well as to keep track of bugs and timely address them, in order to maintain the app’s competitiveness, MAU, and retention rates.
Best iOS development practices to consider
Prototyping
This is a multi-stage process of feature requirements validation and identification of inconsistencies in project specifications, design concept and so on. It’s vital for accurate estimation and planning.
Modularization and MVVM architecture
Modularization itself provides a quality tech solution which you can easily scale. MVVM pattern, in its turn, perfectly matches with SwiftUI and serves as a great foundation for testable, maintainable and reusable code.
CI/CD for automation
This DevOps practice allows developers to focus on implementing business requirements, code quality and security: CI server (we at Surf use Jenkins) guarantees code consistency of the application build and CD prepares the infrastructure, performs the review and so on. As a result, you get improved quality of the final product and the team can release new versions quicker.
Full app documentation
The level of elaboration and consistency of the documentation directly affects the speed of onboarding a new team member to the project, as well as the speed and ability to transfer the project to a new team. Throughout the development process, we capture the results of each stage and hand over all documentation to the client after the release. Based on our experience, we have formed a set of documents to be transferred, but we can adapt them to the client’s requirements or according to the project specifics.
Manual and automated tests combination
Using this combo developers can deliver stable and secure apps with up to 100% tests coverage by 80% faster. Automated tests work perfectly for unit, UI and integration testing. Manual testing, in turn, is a must for new features and apps with third-party integrations. We at Surf turn to this practice for most of our projects.
Bottom line
Every development team has a unique methodology and set of preferred tools. We made an attempt to highlight those that we have personally tried out and that help us develop effective and convenient applications every day.
If you want to know how to better organize the work on your iOS application or develop iOS apps, write to us and get a free consultation.
