Best practices — what are they?
You can find the finest practices in every business. They are rules of thumb for accomplishing particular activities in the best possible way. Professionals accumulate them with years of experience and share them within their sector.It’s the same in IT and software development. Looking for Hire iOS Developers for your business needs.
However, satisfying it is to study everything on your own, there is an even better option. Observe and learn from other people’s mistakes. This is why we decided to put together these 10 principles that will help you design even greater iOS apps.
Why do you need the finest iOS app development practises?
You don’t want to fall behind, do you? When you integrate the best practices, your learning curve improves. You just learn faster and while doing so you make less mistakes. Obviously, we need to fall from time to time, but that doesn’t imply we need to suffer all the conceivable failures. Implementation of the best practices will help you prevent most of them. Finally, owing to best practices, you can focus on solving genuine problems instead of reinventing the wheel. Looking for hire iPhone app developer in London for your business needs.
List of the best practices in iOS app development
Alright, now is the time to reveal the best practices and golden standards you should integrate in your iOS app development. It will not always be easy, but it’s absolutely worth it.
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Prepare for the war
Many developers feel an intense need to start coding immediately. Although it’s an understandable approach, it’s not the greatest one. Making an application is a complex procedure and you may seldom skip a part without consequences. Before your team starts coding, you need to decide on the app’s architecture and the design patterns to use. Typically, for iOS applications, you will employ a Model-view-controller pattern. In MVC, you divide down the application into components of UI, Data, and Software. It offers the additional advantage of prepping your app for future updates and upgrades.
However, you may also decide to design a hybrid application for iOS and Android. This is a strategic development and marketing choice. Then comes yet another solution of producing a native mobile application with React Native.
This level of preparation entails extensive and wide study. According to our experience, it’s worth the money though. It’s similar to the adage “measure twice, cut once,” but in software development.
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Create and follow the documentation
You should have decent documentation covering all parts of the system. A description of the target project outcome can help you keep on track. Documentation of code will subsequently be an amazing source of information about how and, more importantly, why things had been done in a particular way. Business logic, especially in bigger systems, is something hard to comprehend, and the easily available documentation is a good answer.
It will be easy for your developers to comprehend what the project is about. Especially if they join the squad later in the game.Or, if after several years, someone will have to bring some adjustments. Remember that successful initiatives demand not only exceptional execution but also rigorous controlling.
You will also require sufficient documentation for testing reasons and future quality assurance. Even if you’re the one-man army, it’s likely that some details will disappear from your memory. Moreover, well-written documentation can bring you more reliability and assist your program go through App Store revision.
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APP STORE RULES!
An unexpected thing for many app producers would be that they should start thinking about marketing before they sit down to build. The distribution of your mobile application will be a part of your marketing strategy.One of the greatest, if not the best way to make your iOS software available to all consumers, is to submit it into the App Store. The key bonus is that it gives you better reputation if your program is admitted to the App Store. Why? Because having your app published there may sound straightforward but isn’t. Not at all. In reality, this is another thing you should think about at the stage of planning your application, then during the development process, and preparing for release. If you ignore this part, it’s quite probable that you will spend awful lots of time working on something that won’t be approved for App Store distribution. Apple guidelines address themes like safety, performance, business, design and legal challenges.
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Consider security from the beginning.
If you don’t want someone to hack your application and spoil it, you will need to consider about its security on every stage from architecture design, to coding, to testing, to release.
The biggest security problem is that mobile applications have access to data saved on mobile devices (smartphones, tablets) (smartphones, tablets). Your app shouldn’t function as a gateway for numerous scammers who seek to steal the data or take control over the user’s device. Security considerations will be critical if your app involves online payments or needs to store and use personal information. Your lightheartedness regarding security may result in fraud risk. Badly designed and programmed mobile applications may aid to perpetrate identity theft as well.
To avoid these hazards, you should adopt a security protection technique. The fundamental aspect is to focus on code quality. Take a closer look at your app’s cache, logging process, and authorisation & authentication. You should also explore the development of an extra encryption layer.
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Consider the backward compatibility
It’s evident that if you build an iOS application in 2022, you need to make sure that it operates smoothly on iOS 14 released in December 2020. It’s worth noting that iPhones since 6S to 12 Pro are compatible with the latest update of iOS.
However, if you want your iOS software to be available for a greater variety of consumers, you might consider the backward compatibility. Backward compatibility means your program would run as well on older versions of iOS and older iPhones or iPads.
Depending on your app’s advancement and use of the most latest iOS capabilities, ensuring backward compatibility may be tough. The latest modifications and features include (among others):
That’s the point when you need to decide if and how far backward you want to go.
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Use Xcode
Application development demands an adequate environment. so it’s the major choice of developers. It is the first choice if you seek to build a native iOS app. Also, it’s free and available with all the documentation you would require.
Among other features, Xcode has an intuitive user interface, allows easy testing and bug-fixing and dynamic navigation. Moreover, you can quite easily connect Xcode with GitHub for version control and team communication.
There are alternatives like AppCode. This specific is the most popular (aside from Xcode of course), but it needs Xcode underneath, so it won’t make much sense unless you really need some custom-build capabilities.
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Use CocoaPods Too
So, you already use Xcode and GitHub. There is one more thing called CocoaPods. This dependencies manager will increase your performance by keeping all third-party requirements in order.
Some may ask, why use the third-party dependencies at all? Of course, they can accomplish everything on their own, but you shouldn’t. It simply doesn’t make sense, like reinventing the wheel. Let’s take the password field in your app signup form. You can write all the criteria on your own and test if passwords are validated properly. But you can use GenericPasswordRow Pod and have it done combined with hints and password visibility option.
CocoaPods can even help you create better code. (In a manner, at least…) For example, some developers save configs as constants in their code.
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Start with Minimum Viable Product
You presumably already know what Minimum Viable Product is. Still, its importance cannot be overestimated. Focus on basic elements that will constitute the heart of your program is advantageous in many ways.
First of all, at the very beginning, it’s easier to work on fewer issues and develop an app that is exceptional in a couple of areas. It’s better than an app that’s mediocre in lots of things. Second of all, the delivery of an MVP is speedier and you get feedback sooner. Therefore, you can react and boost users’ pleasure faster leaving behind your competitors. Subsequent versions will make it even better. The third aspect is that MVP is cheaper than a fully formed application. You can think of it as an experiment.
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Aim for a stunning design
Apple has always been famous for great minimalistic design. This component is still relevant for clients who buy iPhones, iPads, or Macs.
There is no need for a showy user interface design. Contrary, your app will profit from something simple.
Luckily for you, Apple provided Human Interface Guidelines. That’s your key source of knowledge regarding iOS app UI design.
These standards remind us that good design doesn’t focus solely on a great layout.
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Keep accessibility in mind
We started talking about accessibility in the context of persons struggling with disabilities. And it’s good, but today we realize that our vision was constricted. As Elise Roy mentioned in her TED talk, ‘when we design for disability first, we often stumble onto solutions that are better than those when we build for the norm’. The accessibility concept makes us develop better applications by considering about varied users’ experience.
Mobile accessibility is also covered by W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Guidelines. Even Apple has articulated it quite precisely in its Human Interface Guidelines, separating accessibility into two key themes. Simplicity and perceivability. In this sense, simplicity means that a user can always interact with the application in the same familiar and consistent way. It’s not only about the consistent interface, but about dividing complex procedures into easier jobs as well. Perceivability means that all content may be perceived in multiple ways, so you can read it (see it), listen to it or even touch it. Think about contrast, huge controllers sound notifications or even voice communication.
