Pillars of Coding
20210507
Pillars of Coding: Native app development
#BehindTheScreens
Continuing our journey behind the screens, our next stop is Coding. A pivotal aspect of app development that provides the key building blocks to creating a market leading, digital offering.
Understanding the relevance of key coding languages will empower you to make the best decisions when planning your digital development project.
At mkodo, the main language we use for iOS native apps is Swift. This is a powerful and instinctive programming language for iOS. Writing in Swift is always recommended as it’s a programme developed and maintained by Apple, giving us the confidence to know that it’s dependable and of the highest industry standard.
As a developer, the fact that Swift is open source is a great benefit to me because it means that I have access to a whole community of developers who are continually contributing to the improvement of the language. Being publicly accessible also means that I can easily stay on top of any new developments and stay up to date with the latest new and exciting features.
Being able to quickly react to these updates is what we pride ourselves in, as it enables us to constantly enhance our customers products in a quick and safe manor, helping them to maintain their competitive edge.
Prior to Swift hitting the market in 2014, the majority of native apps were written in the Objective-C language. Originally developed in the early 1980s, Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging features to the C programming language.
Still today, many apps are written in this language and has traditionally been to go to language for most industry developers. However, at mkodo we find Objective-C to be limiting in regard to the speed and agility needed to keep up with the modern market and introduce new features. Many operators shave legacy systems that still use this language because of the time and cost that would be involved in making the switch to Swift, when updating or developing a customer’s app we will always try to migrate these codes out.
At mkodo we believe Swift is a cleaner and safer than Objective-C. Swift was built with performance in mind and its simple syntax, and ‘hand-holding’ help you develop faster, it also lives up to its name: as stated on apple.com, Swift is 2.6x faster than Objective-C.
It’s also a lot safer, by design, with compiled type safety features and automatic memory management, making our solutions a lot less prone to error and providing a smoother and lightning-fast experience for users.
To find out more about how we at mkodo can help you with coding and other key app development needs, please get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you!
