Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Arrays enable you to group and order elements of the same type, so they play a crucial role in organizing your app’s data. If you’re building an iOS app, arrays are a vital part of your toolkit, and today we’re going to help you understand them. Specifically, we will give you a backend view of how Arrays work and jump into a host of specific operations, from simple filtering and sorting to complex ways of mapping and reducing them.

In iOS, geofencing is a location-based feature that enables us to define geographical boundaries and trigger actions, or alerts, when a device enters or exits those boundaries. This feature has become vital to all kinds of apps, enabling them to deliver personal, timely and contextual experiences.

Unit tests are performed on a single unit of code, usually on a specific function, variable or flow. They allow us to test the components in isolation and validate each single component’s reliability in turn. In this article we’ll introduce the concept of Swift unit testing, and explain, at a high level, why you should carry them out, how you can start developing your iOS apps in a test driven development methodology and how you can write Swift unit test cases.

This is the most fertile time for mobile app development since the launch of the App Store. Our industry is in the grip of several simultaneous revolutions, each of them bending, flexing and moulding to the others. 5G promises to make our apps 10 times faster; wearable technology lets them wrap themselves around our bodies; artificial intelligence enables them to learn from us and get smarter every day. But this torrent of innovation brings challenges, too.

In Swift there are 3 primary types of collections to store your data in a structured way, namely: In this article we aim to give you an overview of each. Specifically we want to show how they’re declared, illustrate the most common operations of each, provide comparisons between them where applicable and highlight the various performance considerations.

Closures provide a powerful, flexible way for iOS developers to define and use functions in Swift, replacing the blocks used in its predecessor Objective-C. They provide self-contained modules of functionality that you can move around in your code, similar to the lambdas found in other programming languages. Crucially, closures can capture and store references to any constants and variables from the context in which they’re defined.

We use them to manage users’ log-in sessions, impose time-outs, display dates when content was posted and show the most recent publications to users. This is crucial to a variety of apps, from digital diaries to diet and exercise planners, and onto travel-booking resources. As our user bases become more geographically diverse, so time management gets even more important.