5 Alternatives For Developing Native iOS Apps

Nerval's Lobster writes "]The simplest way to join the ranks of iOS developers is to learn Objective-C and/or Swift (the latter, while not quite ready for prime-time upon release, has gotten a lot better with its recent v1.2 update). But for everybody who doesn't want to go down that route, there are other ways to create native iOS apps. Over at Dice, David Bolton went through five alternatives: Xamarin, Codename One, Embarcadero C++ Builder/Delphi XE/AppMethod, RemObjects C#/Oxygene, and DragonFireSDK. (Three of the systems, excepting Rem Objects C# and DragonFireSDK, are cross-platform, as well.) His conclusion? "There's no shortage of systems for developing native apps for iOS and other platforms, but cost will most likely determine your choice. Other than the annual Apple developer fee, creating in Swift and Objective-C; with regard to [these alternative] platforms, Embarcadero is the most expensive."

Comments

Swift is ready

[SuperKendall]

People are shipping production apps with Swift. It works fine, the main lingering issues are more with XCode stability than the usability of Swift itself.

As I've grown used to it I favor it over Objective-C now, and I don't find it very hard to switch back and forth as needed for older projects or older code in the same project.

One thing I really like is a very layered syntax, where you can be pretty verbose and clear if you like, but also strip away a lot of symbology when that makes sense for more terse code.

Re:It's a multivariate problem

[dgatwood]

Here's the thing: No decent UI is going to be portable anyway. Every platform out there has its own idioms that users expect an app to obey, and no cross-platform technology will realistically conform to those idioms well enough to not feel out of place.

The only good approach for writing portable code is to get people who understand the platform to write a fully native UI, and to write all the underpinnings in a portable language. Share the model, and maybe share the controller, but don't even attempt to share the view. Therein lies the path to madness.