The article discusses five best practices for iOS development:
1. **Use Native UI Components Instead of Image-based Elements:** By leveraging system UI elements and Apple’s SF Symbols, developers can ensure a consistent look and feel across apps, improve performance, and scalability by using vector or code-drawn graphics instead of image-based elements.
2. **Follow Consistent Coding Style (Swift & Objective-C):** It is essential to adhere to naming conventions, consistent formatting, and use tools like SwiftLint to maintain a clean and consistent coding style across Swift and Objective-C codebases.
3. **Implement Robust Code Versioning and Management:** Utilizing a branching strategy, leveraging pull requests and code reviews, maintaining a clean commit history, and managing a large codebase with modularization are crucial aspects of effective code versioning and management.
4. **Adopt Best Tooling and Workflow Practices (CI/CD, Automation):** Embracing tools like Xcode, continuous integration systems, Fastlane, and continuous delivery practices can automate testing, building, and deployment processes, ensuring code quality, catching bugs early, and saving time.
5. **Using Observables Instead of Callbacks:** Shifting towards reactive programming with observables (such as Combine in Swift or ReactiveCocoa in Objective-C) can lead to cleaner, more maintainable code, improved readability, reusability, error handling, and reduced complexity in managing asynchronous interactions.
By incorporating these best practices, a hypothetical company named AppCo improved their iOS development workflow, leading to enhanced UI consistency, reduced bugs, smoother versioning and deployment processes, and a more scalable and maintainable app. Following these best practices can help iOS developers streamline their workflow, improve code quality, and create apps that delight users.