Many design patterns guide iOS architecture. People have varying opinions on what constitutes good app architecture in iOS.

I, for one, have issues with all the modern iOS architecture “best practices.”

Their main problem is that they only focus on massive view controllers. While this is a problem that we need to address, it’s far from being the only one.

After years of working in many teams with diverse backgrounds, I created the Lotus MVC Pattern to address these issues.

I have taught this new pattern to my students and email subscribers for some time now. I recently presented it at MobileFest in Kiev, and this is the first time I show it publicly in a detailed article.

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Finding your way in the navigation of a complex iOS app can be quite complicated.

I know this from experience.

During many years of freelancing, I joined many projects at an advanced stage of development.

When you browse the classes in a project, there is a disconnect from what you see in code and what you see in the app.

And when you find a bug in some screen, how do you know in which class to look?

To solve the problem of visualizing the navigation flow of an app, Apple introduced the concept of storyboards in iOS development.

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The Model-View-VievModel pattern has recently become of fashion in the iOS development community.

But it’s not without its controversies.

I, for one, I have my reservations the classin implementation of MVVM as an architectural design pattern. But I also think that some of its ideas are sound.

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Networking nowadays is a requirement for most modern iOS apps.

This often takes the form of interfacing with a remote web service that provides data for an app.

And this web service is often a REST API that returns data in the JSON format.

But writing network code in Swift is not a simple task.

Making asynchronous network calls requires the interaction of many separate parts belonging to the architecture of an iOS app.

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When I started freelancing a few years ago, things did not go well at the beginning.

I started freelancing at a moment in which I was not happy with my employer and I was looking for another job. Back then a friend told me that there was a lot of work freelancing as an iOS developer.

That was what convinced me to make the sudden jump. But it turned out to be quite different.

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Many iOS developers seem to go for very complex storage solutions when iOS offers very quick and easy ones that are much better for many tasks.

I myself made such mistake in the past. When the iOS SDK first came out I decided to make a little game for the iPhone. It was a little card game and as such it had to store the values for each card as well as information about the deck and cards the player collected. And I used the worst solution possible.

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Sometimes it is hard to know which technology to use in iOS for a specific task.

Storing data is indeed one of these cases. When I wrote my first app, a diet app for the Mac when the iPhone did not exist yet, I used Core Data to store its data (macOS and iOS share the same technologies and frameworks). Looking back, I think that was probably the right choice at the time, given the kind of data the app handled. But back then I had no idea and no way to tell. I picked Core Data just because I heard other developers talking about it and I didn’t know any other way. When it came to store static data in the app, though, I definitely made the wrong choice.
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