Mobile App Developer ranked near the top of just about every legitimate “hot jobs” list for the coming years. There is an incredible opportunity right now for anyone who wants to pursue a career as an iOS App Developer. The iPhone and iPad are arguably the two most important pieces of technological hardware created in the last twenty years, and both rely on iOS to serve as their operating system. That is why iOS developers are in such high demand. Any company that wants to reach the tens of millions of customers that use and love Apple mobile products need to have iOS experts in their workforce, and they are currently searching far and wide for them. If you’re thinking about starting a career, accelerating a career, or changing a career towards iOS development, this is the perfect time to start. So, how to become an iOS developer? What skills do you need to become an iOS developer? Building iOS applications require a deep knowledge of programming and design. There are a few basic ideas that all iOS developers should know. Here we’ve put together some essential abilities that you need if you want to be an iOS developer - Build a Portfolio A portfolio is a crucial component of your work. So, The first step to becoming a professional iOS developer is to build your portfolio. It’s as important as your professional reputation, keeping your tools sharp, and learning new things every day. Your portfolio is the culmination of your work. When you interview with a potential employer or client, your portfolio can do the talking for you. Your curriculum vitae (CV) should list former employers, your education, and a quick list of tools and techniques, so the interviewer can scan those and tick the appropriate boxes. This makes the interviewer feel safe because they’re afraid of hiring the wrong person and losing their job. Always be Passionate Learning may get boring sometime, but if you have a passion towards the things that you are interested in, it would be much easier to master it. If you want to learn iOS development, you must love this job first. Learn basic iOS design iOS app is well received by its elegant, concise interface and consistent operation. Apple released iOS human-computer interaction guidelines to help developers to design an App. This is a must-read tutorial for every iOS developer. Get an iOS device Go and buy a Mac. With using Mac, you can learn the design philosophy of the Apple. Mac, iPod, and iPhone devices are also necessary to test your App. Learn Swift Swift is the programming language Apple created specifically for developing their apps. It is a powerful and intuitive programming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. This is the language of all present and future development for iOS. So you have to know about it! It’s not a “small” language, but you don’t need to know everything land at a junior level. What you WILL need to do is make sure you’re comfortable with basic syntax, options, control flow (If and Switch Statements), classes, inheritance and initialization, error handling, and Objective-C Interoperability. It's highly recommended to learn Swift. It makes much easier to build an iOS app based on the Apple platform. Learn Cocoa Touch Cocoa Touch is the most important UI framework for iOS development. It is very powerful and provides a lot of basic tools and API which can be directly used. The unique interface of iOS means that Cocoa Touch has the same unique design. With UIKit, you can access special GUI controls, buttons, and full-screen views on iOS. You can also control the application with accelerometers and Multi-Touch gestures. You need to learn Cocoa Touch while mastering the basic programming. Get knowledge of SCCS SCCS stands for Source Code Control Management. It is a very important part of software development. This allows users to retrieve the original source code of the previous versions. There are two common source code control management tools - SVN and Git, but Git is becoming the most popular source code control management tools. Get Integrated with iOS tools Mockplus is a prototype design tool. The prototype design is an indispensable part of the development process of an APP. Perhaps you will think this is the designer's work, and you have nothing to do with it. But prototyping design is a must need a process to the developer so that you can better communicate with the designers. Mockplus as the most easy-to-use prototyping tool. Xcode is an iOS development tool. It was developed by Apple and runs under Apple's Mac operating system. It provides an integrated development environment for developers to develop Mac OS X and iOS applications. Xcode supports source code for the programming languages C, C++, Swift, Objective-C, Objective-C++, Java, AppleScript. You will find Xcode compiling very fast, every operation is quick and easy. And with an iOS device, Xcode can deploy the application to your iOS device. Xcode provides a friendly and convenient application development environment, so you can develop an excellent iOS application. Core Data is essentially THE persistence framework for Apple devices. Imagine if every time you used an app, your data was lost. This would be similar to the early days of video games, where you had to beat Super Mario Brothers in one run since you couldn’t save progress. Core Data is the most important framework for storing data on Apple devices. Grand Central Dispatch is what allows you to add what’s called “concurrency” to your apps, thereby making it possible for multiple tasks to run simultaneously with ease. Apps do a lot at once - pulling data from a network, displaying information on the screen, reading touch inputs from the user and etc. Running all of these things at one time would put incredible strain on the user’s phone. It would either run really slowly or crash. So you need to learn about concurrent programming. Spatial Reasoning Abilities The ability to think in 3-D, and visualize the spatial relations between objects, is critical for successful App Developers. Simply put, when you design interfaces for devices like the iPhone, Apple Watch, or the new Apple TV, you must be cognizant of how users will interact with your application. So you need to understand the types of controls/inputs available for the different platforms, and be a user of the devices you’re targeting so that you can reason about them! Github GitHub is a social platform to share the source code. Github has more than 900 million developer users. It has become the most preferred way for managing software development and discovering existing code. Uploading your application to GitHub is to let your interviewer be able to see your source code. What’s more, this is a good learning site, you can see others source code in there too. JSON for Networking To understand the importance of networking to app development, because almost every app we interact with talks on the web in some way. For that reason, it’s crucial for you to understand how to send and receive data from the network. How this is done is through something commonly referred to as JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. That might sound complicated if you’re not familiar, but it’s a really a standard format that’s actually fairly straightforward. Keep Learning As an iOS developer, keep learning is the only way to enhance your iOS development skills. To catch the latest trends and news of iOS development, the following learning websites and books can give you some inspirations and help. Join Community Finding a community to learn is a key to success as an iOS developer, especially when you’re just starting. You can participate in local iOS meetups to meet other developers face to face. The most common way to interact is by joining an online community. Being part of a community means having a support system around you, a group of individuals you can rely on will help you when you’re stuck or when you lose motivation. So, if you’re ready to be in demand, iOS developer is a great career choice! You start by doing work worth showcasing. You gain real-world experience by doing so. Now you know that’s what really matters to a client or employer. When you do your work, you deliver beyond spec. You can share your experiences with us in the comment section. Thank you!