How to become Junior iOS developer ?

5 min readJun 14, 2021

First of all ;

You need to be patient. This is a not a short journey. Why ?
When i create my first project in swift , i didnt know literally anything about swift. If you have some skills about coding,algorithms,debugging of course you will be comfortable when you learning swift programming. Even you know some process you have to learn specific parts of swift.

Here is a structure of iOS Development

The IDE
The Language
Source Control
Apple’s HIG(Human Interface Guidelines)

Development Needs

Coding Skills
UI Components
Application Architecture
Networking
Debugging
Threading and Concurrency
The iOS SDK

Xcode

Xcode is the IDE to use to develop iOS apps. It’s the only way to edit storyboards, xibs, and Core Data files. Make sure that you’re working with the latest version and that your course, book, tutorial, or screencast is, too. If they’re teaching a different version from what you have, you may have trouble following along. Apple is pretty quick about deprecating old versions of Xcode and forcing developers to submit apps with the latest version, so don’t waste your time on an older version.

Here’s what you should know about Xcode:

How to create a new project, add files and classes
How to build and run your app
How to set breakpoints and debug
How to browse and search Apple’s documentation

Swift

Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Writing Swift code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and Swift includes modern features developers love. Swift code is safe by design, yet also produces software that runs lightning-fast.

Basic syntax
Optionals
Control Flow (If and Switch Statements)
Classes, inheritance & initialization
Error handling
Objective-C Interoperability

This site is the official guide for swift.. If you care about exact information.

Use it, play with it,change it, develope it.

https://swift.org

iOS

The iOS platform is what gives you access to all the great hardware in iOS devices as well as an extensive library of user interface widgets. It defines lifecycles for applications and views that you need to know, in addition to the basics like how to build a UI. Of course, you should be learning on the latest version of iOS so you don’t waste your time learning the old UI, frameworks, and classes.

Here’s what you should know about iOS…

Building a UI
The application lifecycle (UIApplication, UIApplicationDelegate)
The UIViewController lifecycle
Navigation (navigation bar, tab bar, page control)
Table views (UITableView, UITableViewController)
Handling user interaction
Displaying and transitioning between views
How to get data from a REST API (NSURLSession)
Parsing JSON (NSJSONSerialization)
The latest version of iOS

Source Control

Source control refers to tracking and managing changes to code. This ensures that developers are always working on the right version of source code.
Source control management (SCM) refers to tools that help you keep track of your code with a complete history of changes.
Source control is important for maintaining a single source of truth for development teams. Plus, using it helps facilitate collaboration and accelerates release velocity.
That’s because it allows multiple developers to work on the same codebase. They can commit and merge code without conflicts. And they can even make edits to shared code, without unknowingly overwriting each other’s work.

Apple’s HIG

Understand several UI components as defined in the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) in iOS
Understand and reason about basic Auto Layout in iOS
Be able to reason about both programmatic and storyboard-driven interfaces
Produce basic designs to a specification using a storyboard or through a programmatic interface

Development needs:

There can be no complete list of technical skills for a Junior developer, so consider this to be a guide, and a subjective one at that.

Coding skills

UI Components

UITableView with default and perhaps a custom cell
UICollectionView with default and perhaps a custom cell
Subclass UIView for a purpose
Some understanding of the reusability of components

Application architecture

Have some understanding of the MVC architecture, and perhaps the advantages of MVVM
How the structure of an App might help with Unit testing

Networking

Know something about URLSession and decoding JSON
Be able to use Codable, or at least be aware of it

Debugging

Some basic knowledge of lldb
Be able to use the Visual Debugger
Be able to use Xcode’s memory graphs

Threading and concurrency

Understand the difference between parallel and concurrent execution
Have some knowledge of threads and reference counting (ARC)

The iOS SDK

Some knowledge of UIKit (this could be replaced with SwiftUI)
Some understanding of OOP in software design and programming
The Delegate protocol pattern
Some understanding of SwiftUI (although for jobs this may still be relatively early)
Be able to use StackView
Protocol orientated programming
Some knowledge of CI/CD and the implications for an iOS developer
Some understanding of Code Principles (i.e. SOLID), as applied to iOS applications
Storyboard constraints
Modularisation of iOS applications
Perhaps some knowledge of Combine
Perhaps some understanding of offline support (possibly Core Data)
Possibly some understanding of reactive programming, perhaps RxSwift
Possibly Core Graphics, and animation
Perhaps gain some understanding of the difference between developing for iPhone and iPad (you might extend this to TvOS and WatchOS, depending on the target company)

So what you can do about it?

You are then best off trying to create a new project from scratch, parse and process JSON from an API endpoint. Many technical projects will ask you to do this, and getting prepared for them will be a great use of your time (rather than endlessly) following tutorials.

You can of course follow tutorials, but you need to be able to think about what you are doing and reason through your project. In order to do so you would be well advised to make your own project, and then find tutorials that help you to build the feature you are looking for.

Conclusion

Creating a list of things you need to know has really brought it home to me how much we expect developers to know.

Good luck!