Building an iOS App
Using a Mac you are able to create iOS apps that will run on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch using Objective-C. The Objective-C is an abstract version of C from Apple. It carries some Smalltalk influences and is used mainly for building Mac and iOS apps.
Because iOS has less fragmentation than Android, it is simpler to for creators to make a one-size-fits-all app for the App Store than to make one for Google Play. Beyond the knowledge of Objective-C some other requirements arise for creating an iOS app, which are – Xcode (a free tool necessary for building an app), Mac that runs OS X 10.7 or later, and an iOS SDK (Software Development Kit).
Objective-C
This is the standard for iOS. The iPhone and all the iOS programming, is all written in Objective-C via Apple’s Xcode IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
The advantages of using Objective-C are these – You get high performance, which means getting to use the extra functions of the phone, like the camera. There is also a growing developer community out there that new app developers are able to reach out to and get help. In addition to that, the coding of your iPhone app built in Objective-C lets the app match up with the ‘feel’ of all of the iOS supported devices.
There are, however, a few difficulties in the Objective-C programming. For instance, this language is not so easy to learn. Additionally, some of the elements of the Xcode are quite different from the typical development process. Lastly, Objective-C will not allow your app to be scaled to fit other platforms like Windows phone or Android phones.
Building an Android App
With Android (open-source OS), the developing of apps is mainly done in Java. You can build your Android apps on Mac or Windows, and buy fairly cheap devices for testing them. As Android continues to totally dominate the market share, there are more and more mobile developers selecting it to get started over iOS. If you have an expertise in Java, you can target several sri lanka jobs for Android development.
Java
Java come in second among the most popular programming languages. It enforces solid OOP (Object Oriented Principles) which are used in today’s moder languages and that include Perl, PHP, Python, and C++.
So to build an Android app, it comes down to learning 2 major skills (languages), which are Android and Java. Java is the actual ‘language’ used in Android. However, the Android side also involves XML for designing the app along with learning all the Android concepts, and then applying those concepts programmatically using Java. After you have learned Java and XML (the XML is quite easy to learn and should actually just be ‘picked up’ as you go about programming your app as opposed to taking time to learn it beforehand like you would Java). What you need to do is learn how you connect the two using the principles of Android.
Eclipse and Android Studio are IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). IDEs are for compiling and running your code with the touch of a button. This is unlike many other applications where it would be necessary to write code to be compiled and then write some type of code to run it. You just have to install Android’s SDK with Eclipse. You could also code Java using other programs besides Eclipse to run your code.
Overall, Java does not give you machine-level control like C does. However, you do have the ability to access and manipulate the most important PC parts such as the graphics, filing system, and sound. You can do this for any fairly sophisticated modern program, and it can run on any type of operating system.