Preface

It’s hard to remember a time without mobile apps. For a 10-year-old who uses an iPad to watch videos, play games, and draw pictures, apps have always been a part of his or her life. There are over a million and a half iOS apps out there, running on iPhones, iPads, iPod touches, and now Apple Watches. It’s tempting to say that apps aren’t novel, or that they’re not a big deal anymore.

But that’s like saying the web isn’t a big deal. Of course it is. And for mobile users, the app often replaces the web. Apps are faster, more secure, more immediate, and more personal than any web page can be. When you use an app, you have a sense that it’s yours, because everything it’s doing is happening right there in your hands.

This immediacy is a big part of what makes writing iOS apps so compelling. It’s also what makes it so different from other kinds of development. If you’ve done web development before, on the server or in the browser, some of it will seem familiar, and yet much will be quite different. Writing apps places different responsibilities on the developer, and gives you different opportunities.

In this book, we’re going to jump into development for iOS, the leading mobile platform, atop which literally millions of apps have been written, installed and run on hundreds of millions of devices. Soon, yours can be one of them.