Top 5 iPhone App Development Tools You Need To Know in 2021

The availability of plenty of iPhone app development tools has made the app development process even simpler and more efficient for the developers now. Here are the top 5 tools for iPhone app developers in 2021.

The market is flooded with innumerable iPhone app development tools now. And, no one can deny the fact that using these tools, including the iOS SDKs and IDEs help in achieving the desired results. These tools also enable developers to efficiently build full-fledged apps using software packages and compiled codes. Also, these tools help to simplify the integration process along with carrying out the back-end services. These ensure a visual app development environment and offer support in the application designing workflow as well.

There are over 2.2 million applications in the iPhone App Store and this incredibly increasing number has made it even more imperative to make use of the available app development tools.

Now, let’s take a look at the top 5 iPhone app development tools developers must know about and use in 2021.

XCode:

This is the official iPhone application development IDE that is used for app development for not only iPhone but for the other iOS devices as well like iPad, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. XCode is the perfect tool for iPhone application development as it helps to publish the applications on the iOS or iPhone App store as well.

XCode comes with a text editor, a build system, and a compiler for efficient application development. Furthermore, the tool also helps the developers in compiling, writing, publishing, as well as in debugging the applications.

Features of XCode:

• Helps with designing and testing the graphical UI of the app without even writing a single line of code.
• Lets developers use the iOS SDK, install, build, run, and debug the applications in a Mac-based simulator as well.
• Helps to easily get complete documentation for finding anything within ‘Help’.

AppCode:

AppCode is an iPhone application development IDE or Integrated Development Environment and helps developers to create iPhone applications using different programming languages like Objective-C, Swift, C, and more. It has also become pretty easy for the app developers to automate the routine tasks like identifying, locating, and fixing the errors using this tool.

AppCode is a smart IDE that simplifies all code management tasks, making things easier and saving more time for the developers. This tool is designed on IntelliJ IDEA platform and is used by writing or creating new plugins or installing the existing plugins.

Features of AppCode:

• Built-in iPhone application development tool that helps to run, debug, and test the applications easily.
• Provides intelligent code assistance to write clean codes and analyse the context and the entire project.
• It is an IDE that supports multiple programming languages like JavaScript, Swift, Objective-C, C, HTML, CSS, XML, and more.

Transporter:

Transporter helps to upload the app content easily and directly to Apple platform. Developers can easily send music, movies, TV shows, and more to the Apple platform through this tool. Developers can also distribute the content on the Apple Music, Apple iTunes, and Apple books Stores with this tool. However, they need to have the App Store Connect, an encoding house account or iTunes Connect for this.

Highlighted features of Transporter:

• Drag and drop feature for transporting the content.
• Check the delivery progress with delivery logs and validating warnings to fix the issues quickly.
• Easy uploading of multiple files at one go for streamlining the delivery process.
• Helps to retrieve the history of the past deliveries with all the dates and times.

Simulator:

iPhone app developers can use this Apple app development tool for prototyping and testing the applications during the application development process. This tool can be considered as a part of the XCode installed tools as well that runs on Mac and simulate Apple devices like iPhones, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, and iPads.

The simulation environment is the combination of a software version and a simulated device that has its own files and settings. These files and settings exist on every iOS device like an iPhone that gets tested thoroughly within the simulation environment for streamlining the interaction process.

Features of the Simulator:

• It helps to smooth out the interaction process with the applications running on iPhones and the other iOS devices using a keyboard and pointer.
• Helps to debug and prototype the apps.
• Let’s you easily test the applications prior to publishing the same on the iPhone or iOS App Store.
• Makes it easy to optimise the graphics of the iPhone or iOS applications.

CocoaPods:

CocoaPods is the dependency manager for all XCode projects. Developers can use this tool for integrating third-party libraries. There are more than 83,000 libraries that are already in use in more than 3 million applications today.

Features of CocoaPods:

• Incorporates and easily manages the third-party libraries integration.
• Helps in resolving the dependencies between libraries.
• Helps with source-based distribution of the third-party codes and also helps in integrating the libraries into the applications.

With these top 5 iPhone app development tools, developers can enjoy seamless and efficient application development no matter what the project complexities and business requirements are.

Johan Smith is a highly skilled and proficient iPhone app developer associated with an award-winning iPhone app development company in Australia, GetAProgrammer. The author has written this article to unbox the top 5 iPhone application development tools in the developer’s toolkit in 2021.

Kimberley Black is an App Development expert and currently a senior tech consultant with GetAProgrammer.