I hated computer science.

The idea of creating an app — or anything with code — seemed impossible. The mere glance at a few lines of code had my head spinning and palms sweating (I'm not exaggerating!). Over the past 1.5+ years, I’ve self-learned app development and created my own apps.

I’m by no means an expert iOS developer. I’m still learning and building every day. But now, I love the idea of coding and bringing my ideas to life.

Once you learn that code is just a way a human instructs a computer to accomplish a task, everything becomes clearer. In the beginning, I was confused and wanted to quit every time I encountered a bug in my code. I told myself that it probably just wasn’t for me.

But like everything worth pursuing in life, learning to code requires consistency and persistence. My goal is to provide you with resources and advice to help you start and successfully continue your iOS development journey. Here are 3 tips that will help you do just that.

Use Xcode and code in Swift

There are two ways to develop an app: ReactNative and Xcode. The former is a tool (created by Meta) to develop applications for iOS, Android, and Windows (as well as a few other platforms) using JavaScript, Java, C++, Objective-C, and Python languages. The latter is a tool (created by Apple) to develop applications for the iOS ecosystem in the Swift language.

I’m 100% unfamiliar with ReactNative, so please take my advice in this section with a grain of salt. But the here’s three reasons why I haven’t developed apps with ReactNative:

  1. Target Market: Currently, I primarily build apps for users in the U.S. (I’m from VA, and I relate with this market better.). Here, the adoption rate for the iPhone is significantly greater than in any other region (e.g. Asia) — nearly 80% of Americans use an iPhone.
  2. User Experience: iPhone — and all Apple users — are very familiar with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines that dictate the entire user experience in all Apple products. Often, when an iPhone user uses an app that doesn’t follow the guidelines, they have an unpleasant experience since they’re inherently used to Apple’s guidelines. Xcode and Swift are built by Apple, so they make it very easy to follow these guidelines.
  3. Available Resources: There are a lot of great free resources to learn Swift. It has a large, supportive community. Here are three free resources I found to be very useful:
    1. CodeWithChris 14 Day SwiftUI Beginner Bootcamp
    2. 100 Days of Hacking Swift
    3. All SwiftUI Property wrappers explained and compared

If you’re confused, start from the basics

Once again, if you encounter a bug in your code or don’t understand someone else’s code, start from the basics and break your code down into different sections. Here are some great questions to help you simplify and understand your code: