How To Make An IPhone App (in 17 Easy Videos)

I’m Chris Ching and I just want to let you know that you’re in good hands. I specialize in teaching beginners and non-programmers how to build iOS apps. Tons of people have learned with me, given me great feedback and built apps! I often get emails asking, “How do I get started with building apps, At first, it seems like a silly question to me because I see so many resources available for making apps. As a beginner, you might not even know what you’re looking for. Do I need a mac, What’s Swift and Objective-C, What’s this Xcode thing, What sort of equipment do I need, And to top it all off, there’re a lot of outdated resources out there. The worst part is that you might not even be able to tell that it’s no longer relevant if you’re just starting out. Talk about frustration and huge amounts of wasted time!

This guide on how to make an app is going to change all that. Orientation: All of the tools that are available. Which ones are important and which ones are not. Mindset: The critical mindset to prime yourself for learning app development. You’re going to have completed your first app within the next 20 hours. It’s time to catch you up to speed and give you the lay of the land. Let’s do this in a quick question/answer format! What do I need to learn in order to build my app, I recommend to focus on the core/basic skills first which you’ll find from the lessons below. After that, you’ll have to identify which traits your app has in order to know what to learn next. For example, if your app needs to have users register and login then you’ll need to have a database to store that data. I’m writing an article that can help you with identifying those traits once you’ve completed the basic training.

Make sure you’re on my newsletter to be notified when it’s published! How long will it take for me to build my app, This is a really hard question to answer because some apps are easy, some are complex and everyone learns at different speeds. Also some people have really busy schedules so they can’t dedicate much time to learning. In terms of number of hours, I would say at least 20 to get some of the fundamentals down. Should I learn Swift or Objective-C, Swift all the way because it’s what Apple has transitioned to. It’s way easier for beginners to pick up and now that it’s open source, Swift is beginning to be used for other things as well such as server side development. Lastly, it’ll also make it a lot easier to find tutorials on the net for Swift because most educators have moved to teaching with Swift.

Do I need a Mac, Can I use a PC, Technically yes, because the program where we write Swift code and design the app is a MacOS app and Apple hasn’t released a Windows equivalent. If you’re technical enough, use virtualization software such as VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox to run MacOS on your PC. In addition to that, there’re a lot of third party solutions to create iOS apps where you wouldn’t need a Mac at all. If you are thinking about buying a Mac, you can buy used to save some money. An iMac, MacBook, Mac Mini.. As long as it can run the latest operating system, you’ll be good to go because Xcode usually requires the latest. A safe bet for current compatibility and getting mileage out of your purchase is to get something less than 2 years old. What sort of equipment do I need, Aside from a Mac (or using one of the PC solutions above), not much else!

You’ll need to download Xcode for free from the Mac App Store. Swift doesn’t need to be downloaded separately. Then you just need to launch Xcode and start following along! You don’t need to pay anything if you just want to run the app on your own device. I’ve noticed that having the right mindset when starting out is a strong predictor of whether or not the student will succeed. So what’s this mindset, Impatience leads to frustration which leads to quitting. As with learning anything new, there’s going to be roadblocks and obstacles but this is where having the right mindset is so important. Those obstacles are opportunities for growth and learning. As a seasoned programmer, I can tell you that a large part of building apps will be troubleshooting and figuring out why your app doesn’t work the way you intended it to. It’s not a knock against the coder; it’s just that when you’re writing code, it’s impossible to foresee 100% of the user scenarios and edge cases and interactions with other parts of your code.