Almost any iOS app has a search feature. In fact, all of our functional iOS UI Kits have a search functionality. To this point, we’ve decided to write this Swift tutorial on UISearchController, walking you through building a search feature for your iOS app in Swift. Our app templates have more complex searching logic, since they are hooked to Firebase backend, which is where the searchable data is being retrieved from. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ve simplified the UISearchController, to simply display a search bar in the navigation bar, by relying on static data, rather than data generated by a server.

In today’s article, we are taking a closer look at what reactive programming in Swift is all about and how we can use this design pattern in iOS apps by leveraging RxSwift. At Instamobile, we are building a ton of cool iOS apps, so we always consider using the most appropriate design patterns to build highly modularized iOS Starter Kits.

Developing an iOS application is still about passing data between objects, but the ecosystem has more modern, safer tools than it did in 2019. In addition to delegates, notifications, closures and KVO, you now have Combine and Swift Concurrency (async/await) which simplify asynchronous flows and composition.

It’s extremely common for a mobile app to support dynamic features such as user management and user-generated content, like social posts, photo uploads, or private messages. To build this functionality, an iOS developer will need a web backend that acts as a central database and serves data to the iOS client. To choose the best backend for your iOS app there are a few things to consider right from the start. Luckily, in most of the cases, the decision is simple: use Firebase.

As the mobile industry continues to evolve, more and more entrepreneurs are looking to build their own iOS apps and publish them to the App Store. The technology has also evolved tremendously in the past few years, and there are various ways of making your app nowadays. In this article, we’re taking a stab at teaching you how to make an iOS app based on your budget.

There is some good news coming out from Q3 2018: the App Store generates almost double the revenue made by Google Play. Not only it makes more money, but the App Store revenue is also growing at a higher rate than Google Play’s generated income. This discovery is extremely important since it shows where the money really is for mobile developers and tech entrepreneurs.

While working on our newly launched Dashboard iOS app template, we had to figure out how to add a padding to the placeholder of a UITextField control. It turned out there’s no native support for this design tweak, so we had to create our own subclass of UITextField.

There is no doubt that there are piles of money to be made in iOS app development. After all, Apple owned 15.2 percent of the global smartphone market last year. However, the worldwide popularity of the iPhone does not mean that an iOS app developer can simply do whatever he or she wants when creating iOS apps. iOS app developers must know these three pitfalls to avoid when trying to make money through iOS app development.

As mobile app development becomes more dominant in the tech world, we can observe several design patterns emerging across the entire mobile app design ecosystem. One of these design subsystems is the skeleton views.

Many of our fully-coded iPhone app templates consist of a drawer menu navigation. This type of navigation usually is triggered by tapping on a menu button on the top left corner of the screen. Once clicked, the menu gets extended from the left side and takes over two-thirds of the screen. Here, the users can choose whatever option they want to navigate to. This type of app navigation is more popular in Android apps, but it gained some ground in the iOS realm as well, especially since concepts like Material design came out. People might also refer to this as hamburger menu navigation.