After many months of pretty much learning swift and iOS development from scratch. I have finished the initial version of Biznss for iOS. Hooray!!!
The first version of the iOS app is quite simple, but does mimic the functionality of the android app, with a few minor modifications needed to navigate Apples eco development system.
It is amazing how different it is to develop for the two different platforms. At the same time, things go a lot faster when you already know what the end product will look like. The android app’s design was slowed down by all the research needed to understand what would work and what wouldn’t. I remembered having to re-write the backend logic for the digital business card sharing more than 10 times in order for it to be able to accommodate changes later on. How to safely store the data took another couple of months.
Coming from Android development, I can definitely see the appeal of the iOS development ecosystem. There were some things that seems unbelievably easier, like how Xcode will upload our release app directly to App Store Connect. Pretty awesome. Also, not having to deal with Gradle and all the complexity associated with that seemed too good to be true.
The customer service and support service was quite impressive. I actually spoke to real people on more than one occasion. Always professional. This never happened with Android.
Other things I was less impressed with, like why is it so hard to create layouts with the built in layout editor (storyboard). And before you say SwiftUI, I believe both SwiftUI and Android Compose are still in its infancy and thus do not offer the degree of granularity of detail in the layouts that you get from it predecessors. Some day soon they will take over, no doubt, but in my opinion, we are not there yet. I feel like they are both designed with fast building in mind, but with so much competition in both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, the only wait to set your app apart with through a unique and customized UI/UX. How can you do that if your app looks and feels like all the others?
And on that subject, I am also not a big fan of cross platform development frameworks. I feel as if they are easy to get started with, and the prospect of coding once and publishing to multiple forms is tempting, but as your development use case get more complex they let you down. So yes, both the Android and iOS app were developed using native frameworks and on Android Studio and Xcode.
The complexity of the App Store Connect interface is a bit higher than that of the Google Play Console (where you’d would upload release versions of your Android apps for review and distribution).
With regards to documentation and getting answers online, I would say that both Android and iOS development are really well documented. Yes, I did use OpenAI’s Chat GPT to help me find answers whenever I got stuck. It definitely cuts down on research time. If I can offer one piece of advice here, don’t ask it to write the code for you, but rather ask it to give you ideas on how to tackle a specific problem, make sure it lists the references when providing answers, and do ask it to revise what you came up with. A second set of eyes does not hurt.
Finally, on to advertising your app. Boy is that expensive, specially on iOS. I was playing around with Apple Search Ads and it looks like 2 installs cost me about $40. I know what you are thinking, “You are not optimizing”, and of course it is more complicated than that, but you are charged by taps, which is basically when someone taps on an impression of your app as it is being presented on the user’s screen at some point while they browse the Apple App Store. You can have a 1000 taps and no installs, users are so cruel.
Android is quite cheaper but long term I don’t know what is more valuable and Android user or an iOS user, time will tell. Bottom line, after all that sweat and tears of effort, hours of frustration, followed by that awesome feeling of building something worth publishing, it going to take more money that most individual developers can spend to get true visibility for your new project. So, yeah there is that.
Want to give Biznss for iOS a try? You can find it here, and please, any and all feedback is welcome and appreciated.
J.
