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 about some of the implementations of MVVM. But I also think that some of its ideas are sound.
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 to get data from a remote API requires the interaction of many complex parts in an iOS app.
Table views are a fundamental piece of almost all iOS apps.
Still, most developers get them wrong, especially using Swift.
This happens in two different ways:
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.
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.
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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I believe that most of the business advice for iOS developers you read online is wrong.
I run both a freelancing business and an online business related to iOS development. The funny thing is that I do so ignoring most of the common business advice I usually read, while I still have great results for both my businesses. Most business advice I read aimed at app developers just makes me shake my head.