100 Days of iOS App Development

Choosing the right path for development depends on many criteria that developers need to consider before making a decision. Let’s list down some key points that need to be considered before making a decision. There are various points like passion and interest, career flexibility, job market demand, and current and future trends are need to be considered before making a decision about choosing the right career.

In terms of development, considering current and future trends, the market of Mobile App development is going at a rapid speed and it can be a fruitful career path for developers. When we talk about Mobile development, we need to choose between Android and iOS mobile app development. Today in this article we will discuss iOS App Development. In this guide to 100 Days of iOS development, we will take native app development using Swift and cross-platform development Flutter.

What is iOS development?

The mobile operating system (OS) for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch is called iOS. To develop iOS apps and accessories for these devices, Apple offers resources and tools. The process of developing apps for Apple’s mobile operating system—the one that powers the iPhone and iPod Touch—is known as iOS development. It is fundamentally similar to other forms of software development or app development.

100 Day Plan

Starting our 100-day journey into iOS App Development would be a very exciting and rewarding endeavor for beginners. In this article, we will guide you to each important phase and key steps that you can achieve in the journey of 100 days.

Let’s start our 100-day iOS Application journey.

Day 1-10 Setup and Installation:

Our initial journey will start with a basic setup like understanding S/W and SDK requirements and installing them. In this 10-day journey, we will make ourselves comfortable with IDE understanding and will create a Hello World Application.

Topics	iOS Native	Cross Platform – Flutter
IDE Installation: (Day 0-1)	Setup Xcode which is the official IDE for iOS development.	Install Flutter and Dart SDK along with IDE(Android Studio or Visual Studio).
Understand the basics: (Day 2-9)	Familiarise yourself basics for iOS native development and learn Swift language.	Learn about Dart programming language for Flutter iOS native development.
Create your First App: (Day 10)	Create your First iOS Application. using Swift.	Create your First Flutter Application
IDE exploration:	Do some experiments with Swift in Xcode playground and gain hands-on experience.	Utilise dart pad, or other online editors for hands-on coding exercise.

Day 11-30: Diving into UI/UX Design:

After completing our first 10 days journey now it’s time to dive into UI/UX designs. In this phase we will learn basic layout, Views, Widgets and how to enforce validation on input fields. After completion of this journey we will be able to create UI screens for iOS applications. We will also have a glance at the lifecycle of ViewController and views, which is very important for navigation and screen flows.

Topics	iOS Native	Cross Platform – Flutter
UI Layout: Day(11-15)	View Autosizing Autolayout The View Hierarchy Storyboard	Layouts – Row, Column, Grid
Views: Day(16-20)	Text and Web Views Buttons IBOutlets and IBActions Controlling Rotation Behaviour	Widgets and Elements
Lifecycle: Day(21-25)	View Controller Lifecycle	Widget Lifecycle
User Input and Validation: Day(26-30)	Form validations	Form validation

Day 31-50: Mastering Functionality:

Now it’s time to jump into the functionality part, this is a very important phase as it will deal with application flow. In this phase we will learn navigation, state management, local data store(native and third party library) and API calling things. Developers need to pay more attention in this phase because from this phase developers have to play with business logic.

• Clear understanding of navigation helps developers to create app flow seamless and efficient.
• Strong grip on states help developers to create app that could be best in terms of performance.
• Database and Network call learning phase will help developers to store and retrieve data in the best way and display them to users.

Topics	iOS Native	Cross Platform – Flutter
Navigation: Day(31-35)	Navigation bar Tab bar UINavigation Controller	Routes and Navigator GetX Navigation Bottom Navigation bar
Intents and State management: Day(36-40)	Application States AppDelegate	State Management GetX Lib BLoC Provider
Local Storage: Day(41-45)	User Defaults Core Data Realm	Shared Preference File Storage SQLite
Network Call: Day(46-50)	Alamofire integration	API Call GET POST

Day 51-70: Enhancing User Experience:

In this phase of our journey we will pay attention to making user experience better. We will learn Animations, Localization, Firebase Integration and Permission models in these days of our journey.

• Animations are very useful to get the attention of end users, having animations in apps increases the users experience in App.
• Permissions takes care of users data safety, and does not allow apps to use users data until permission is being granted by users.
• For Web or App development Firebase provides many features that developers can’t skip in the learning phase. We will learn all Firebase features in this phase.

iOS Native	Cross Platform – Flutter
Custom View	Customise Design
App Localization	Internationalization
BadooUIKit Size Classes Safe area	Responsive Design Media Query
Animation UIKit Core Animation UIViewPropertyAnimator	Animations Lottie Animation Hinge Animation Hero Animation Rive Animation
Firebase FCM FireStore ImageStore	Firebase Email Authentication FireStore FCM Image Store
SDWebImage Reactive Cocoa	Fonts Exercise

Day 71-90: Advance learning:

Time to move towards some advanced topics like Architecture – Very important for maintaining large scale projects, Dependency Injections – Important for Code reusability, Unit testing – Needed to check code does not break in new implementations.

• Choosing correct Architecture will help in maintaining long term and large scale projects.
• Dependency Injections are quite tricky to add in projects. It might take some time in understanding but once it’s added it saves lots of time for developers.
• We can use builtin classes to enforce dependency injection in iOS.

Topics	iOS Native	Cross Platform – Flutter
Architecture: Day(71-78)	MVVM MVP VIPER MVC	BLoC GetX
Dependency Injection: Day(79-84)	Dependency Injection	Manual KIWI Lib
Unit Testing: Day(85-90)	Write Unit tests using XCTests	Unit Test

Day 91-100: Continues Learning and Real-World Projects:

After completing 90 days of our journey, we will enter into the last 10 days where we will learn basics of Version control, CICD pipeline – to make build process automatic so tester can take testing build directly, Deployment – Publishing app to AppStore or TestFlight to make applications available to end users.

Large number of open source projects are available on web which are developed by experienced developers, forking those projects and reviewing their code helps developers to follow best coding practices.

• Version Control : Day(91-92)
• Fork and Contribute to Open source Projects : Day(93-94)
• Join Developers Community : Day(95)
• CICD Integration : Day(96-98)
• Deployment and Publishing : Day(99-100)

Conclusion

In the duration of 100 days, our journey of iOS Application Development, for both Native and Cross-platform has been nothing short of transformative. Beginning from understanding of basic concepts to advanced topics like architecture pattern, deployment, each step plays a vital role for becoming a quality mobile application developer.

As we are concluding our 100 days journey, its time to celebrate the achievements lesson learned. The skills that we acquired, challenges that we have overcome will help us in our life long journey.

Happy Coding!