The demand for App developers is more than its supply with the post of App Developer being ranked near the top of every legitimate hot job list for the coming years and beyond.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected a stupendous growth for App developer jobs to increase by 20% over the next five years.
There are about 83,469 more mobile app development jobs posted than actually hired and that shows how everyone wants to pursue a career as an App Developer.
With the growth of technological hardware in the form of iPad and iPhones over the last two decades with both of them relying on iOS as their operating system, there is indeed a high demand for iOS developers.
Therefore, the million-dollar question is what it takes or needed to become an admirable iOS Developer.
As such, hiring managers’ search for these seven skills required for hiring an iOS Developer as discussed hereinbelow
Spatial Reasoning
As a successful iOS Developer, the candidate must have the ability to think visually and critically.
It means when an iOS developer designs interfaces for devices like iPhones, Apple Watch or the new Apple TV, the concerned iOS developer needs to be cognizant of how users will interact with their application.
The iOS developer should understand the types of controls/inputs for the different platform and be well understood the technicalities of the devices from the user’s point of view.
While in some candidates, spatial reasoning may be an inborn talent whereas for others it can be acquired and mastered with practice by building real projects.
Swift Language
Swift is the programming language created by Apple for developing their apps and would be a language of all future development for iOS.
Therefore, as an iOS developer, you need to have expertise in the following areas of the Swift language such as
- Basic Syntax
- Optionals
- Classes, inheritance & initialization
- Error Handling
- Objective-C Interoperability
Design Guidelines
iOS applications or apps adhere to a strict set of design guidelines and in order to build your own intuitive apps, one needs to know and understand these design patterns.
As an iOS developer one should be an expert in these design guidelines that include critical things or programs like
- MVC (Model-View-Controller)
- Delegate Pattern
- Notifications
Core Data
Core Data is the most important framework for storing data on Apple devices and is essentially is the persistence framework for Apple Devices. As an iOS App Developer, you must be proficient in Core Data as a subject matter expert.
Networking
As an expert iOS App Developer, you need to understand the intricacies of networking because every app we interact with talks to the web in some way and as such it is crucial for you as an iOS App developer in understanding how to send and receive data from the network.
As an iOS App developer, you need to be an expert in JSON – that stands for JavaScript Object Notation.
Git and GitHub
iOS app developer must have skills pertaining to the effective use of version control when working on long-lived projects and having knowledge and expertise of Github apps helps you in implementing various mobile app strategies.
Grand Central Dispatch
Grand Central Dispatch or GCD provides the app developers by adding concurrency to the app allowing it for multiple tasks to run simultaneously without any difficulty.
As an iOS Developer, you need to have enough knowledge and skills about concurrent programming.
The above mentioned seven skills are prerequisites for succeeding as an iOS App developer.
