What's the best way to build an iOS app?
Hi everyone,
My friends and I have an interesting app idea that we want to execute on – but I’m not confident about how we should go about it.
We have some technical background among us – AR/ VR software engineer, software operations/ product manager, and software BD - but none of us have worked directly with Apple Store apps before.
I did some research and the options seemed vast: we could learn Swift but that wouldn't be very time-efficient, and I also played around with Thunkable (no code app builder) for a bit but that's taking quite some time as well. Regardless, I’m still not confident that’s the right path.
The app will be a consumer app similar to Vivino (using Vuforia’s Image Recognition API) for different food items in a particular niche, in a particular country (we have some interested angels!). At this point, we just have the Figma UX/ UI designs and some poor MVP demonstrating the functionality, but nowhere near being released on the App Store.
I would love your advice and thoughts on what's the fastest yet cost-efficient way to build, release, and maintain an iOS app? We’re open to outsourcing it to a freelancer as well, happy to get any suggestions.
Any thoughts welcomed and appreciated. :)
I'm currently building a no-code app builder tool. Working on allowing it to take figma designs and have it generate a full native iOS + Android app. Happy to give you a beta access, just shoot me an email (in my profile) :)
That sounds awesome!! Will do rn.
Last year I was working on a mobile app with no prior experience in building for mobile.
I started with React Native and got so frustrated (not about the Reach part of it though). I wanted to make it work with Firebase and making the setup function ate so much of my time...
Then I tried https://flutter.dev, and I literally spent 20 mins on what I'd been trying to do with React Native for a few hours. So, give Fluter a look.
Best of luck! 💫
+1 to Flutter, I'm working with it right now and it's a blast
Another +1 to flutter. I used it to code my cross-platform video dating app StepUp, and it is so slick. Save a lot of time and also way easier to maintain than having to code and use storyboard at the same time on native iOS.
I build my app in react native and on iOS I am happy with the UI everything is very snappy. But android is a pain, performance is bad and all the different android versions make it horrible to develop. Does flutter solve this? I'm at the point of either build android native or rewrite everything with flutter. What would you recommend?
Flutter covers both IOS and Android with the same codebase. Also, the learning curve is approachable for anyone how did an OOP language before.
There are a few limitations it has though. E.g. you can't (or couldn't as of 1 year ago) make an app that would run in the background with Flutter. So make sure to read the docs to see if your use case is supported.
Other than that, it's a very IH friendly way to build mobile apps in 2020 as it saves a ton of time.
Thanks a ton! I don't know how I missed Flutter in my research but looks very, very cool.
I could say go with outsourcing. Try to find freelancers somewhere from Eastern Europe, particularly Belarus. The developers are not expensive but their work is highly effective. For the past 3 years, I am mostly working with freelancers from Belarus and 2 companies and I m quite satisfied with the price and quality.
Very cool - I would love to hear more if you don't mind. I just sent you an email!
I know a lot of folks are using Adalo for building mobile apps without code. Might be worth exploring for your use case?
The only downside with Adalo is that publishing your app on App Store is not really straight forward - but an amazing tool for prototyping indeed!
I am currently using Flutter to build my app and I don't have prior experience. I have first tried to learn React Native but then I heard Flutter performance is better so I switched to it. Plus I found it easier to create nice UIs in Flutter.
We used Flutter to build PipFeed.
Hi, I'm an iOS dev with Swift and Objective-C experience and recently I worked a few months with Flutter.
There's some cases where Swift might be needed, but I don't know the complexities of your app. I can really recommend Flutter to make a MVP app. It's fun, fast to learn and code, and the developer experience is often better than Xcode / Swift so far.
Can't comment on no code tools as I didn't try them for apps. But especially to validate ideas and build MVPs as long as no code is somehow viable I would do this instead of coding even as developer as it's faster to validate. So you don't waste a bunch of time figuring out what doesn't work.
If you don't need to do any heavy lifting, then using Swift or Objective-C is going to make your life x1000 times harder than it needs to be.
Does your team have any web dev experience? Even if not building the app in Javascript/CSS is much easier than Swift.
I use React Native with a boilerplate and Expo and find it's the easiest. Have also tried NativeScript but it wasn't as friendly and getting the app into the store was a pain.
Expo abstracts away all the complicated under the hood code and handles the app store submission (which is much more of a headache that I imagined).
With React or Nativescript vrs Swift, you also have the advantage that you can roll out the app to Android too without much effort.
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Yeah, the in-app purchase thing is a big issue for some people and ejecting from Expo is a nightmare (in my experience). In-app purchases are in development now, so hopefully it'll be available real soon 🤞
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https://flutter.dev 🙌