Benefits of Using Swift For iOS App Development.

Swift is a general purpose programming language that was developed by Apple Inc for app development on iOS, iPad OS, watchOS, macOS, and other Apple Operating Systems.

First launched in 2014, Swift has come up as an alternative to Objective-C due to its various benefits. For an iPhone app development company, there are a few important business objectives that Swift helps achieve.

This includes:

·         Faster development, shorter cycles, and lower development cost.

·         Dynamic library support for optimized app performance.

·         Improved coding and learning in the Playground environment

·         Less code and simple functions for bug fixing.

Swift’s rise in popularity has made the Objective-C vs. Swift debate reach headlines in the app development world. So let’s analyze the benefits Swift brings to the app development process and why it’s becoming popular within iPhone App development companies.

Speedy Development For Cost-Efficiency

Much like its name, developing an app using Swift is much faster. This is because Swift has an English like structure, simple syntax, and involves shorter code length while coding.

For a complex object sort, this implementation is nearly 4-times faster in Swift than in Python. It is also faster than Objective-C, which is nearly 3 times faster than the Python implementation.

This speed advantage is crucial for an app development company in cost-reduction and shortens the duration of its app development cycle. This helps them establish a better business model and deliver projects within the decided time-frame.

Dynamic Library Support For Better App Performance

An App’s optimization is crucial for its performance. This includes load time, task response time, and overall interface smoothness.

On that end, Dynamic libraries play an essential role in improving an app’s performance. They are essentially chunks of code that are executable and can be linked to an app.

These Dynamic libraries can be uploaded directly to an app’s memory, which helps with in-app optimization and leads to smaller file sizes. Dynamic libraries are also not reliant on the OS for updates while allowing developers to update or change code and recompile it without recompiling the entire application.

This improves the overall app quality, which is often hindered by static libraries such as those used in Objective C.

Playground Environment for Improved Coding

Playground is a development environment that allows programmers to learn the language and execute it without having to create an app. It allows them to test new algorithms and create code chunks to help them improve their swift coding while receiving constant feedback.

This allows them to quickly improve their coding speed and accuracy, and the data visualization provided within the environment helps them with this improvement.

This was Apple’s effort to ensure that developers can quickly learn Swift in order to make it more commonplace, accessible, and usable for the future of iPhone app development.

Less Code And Simple Functions For Easier Bug Fixing And Error Management

One of the biggest problems with code-heavy programming languages is that they are prone to app crashes. The more the code, the higher the chances of error, and the harder it is to find mistakes and fix the bugs in the app that leads to a crash.

Swift provides inline support for the manipulation of data and text strings. In Swift, all you need to do to join two strings is to use the “+” sign while writing repetitive statements. In Objective-C, you have to combine them, which makes the code much lengthier.

With Objective-C, there are many issues that cause app crashes. Swift provides code that is less error-prone because of its inline support for manipulating text strings and data. Additionally, classes aren’t divided into two parts; the interface and the implementation. This cuts the number of files in the project in half, which makes it much easier to handle.

Furthermore, Swift classes are not divided into interface and implementation. This helps reduce the number of files into half, which is easier to handle.

This helps reduce code size, improve coding accuracy, and helps maintain, test, and fix apps much easier.

Conclusion:

On the business side of things and on the development side of things, Swift provides incredible value to iOS app developers and app development companies that develop apps for iOS. Whether it will make Objective-C obsolete is still a debate that doesn’t have a conclusive answer.

But one thing is certain, the benefits of using Swift outweigh the benefits of using Objective-C and trends suggest that the industry is moving favorably towards modern programming languages such as Swift, something that we also see happening within the Java vs Kotlin debate.