Questions tagged [ios]

iOS is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that presently powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

It should not be confused with i5/OS, which is one of IBM's operating systems for the IBM Power Systems (originally AS/400), or with Cisco's IOS (Inter-network Operating System).

iOS Latest Stable Release: iOS 14.3 (18C66) released on December 14, 2020

Latest Preview: iOS 14.4 beta 1 (18D5030e) released on December 16, 2020

iOS is a derivative of Apple's OSX desktop operating system, with which it shares many (but not all) common frameworks and other components. These include Cocoa Touch (the counterpart of the OS X Cocoa UI Framework), the Mach/Darwin/XNU kernel and code from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).

Applications for iOS are written for the Cocoa Touch framework (as opposed to OS X's Cocoa framework) using the same Xcode IDE for official use (i.e. for submitting applications to Apple's App Store) or using unofficial (mostly command-line only) toolchains for various operating systems (including Linux) for unofficial/jailbroken development. OS X is based on the Darwin-OS foundation, itself based on several Unix descendants. On June 2nd, 2014, Apple announced a new language, Swift, which could be used to develop apps for iOS. Swift was in beta until September 9th, 2014, and is, since September 17th, 2018, at version 4.2.0.

Each iOS application runs in its own secure sandbox to prevent (accidentally or intentionally) altering other applications, the operating system, or any other data. Since iOS 8, an iOS application can have extensions that extend custom functionality beyond the application. iOS is optimized for the power, graphics, processor, and memory constraints of mobile devices.

The user interface of iOS is based on the concept of direct manipulation through multi-touch gestures. Interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons, all included in Apple's UIKit Framework. Interaction with the OS includes gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch, all of which have specific definitions within the context of the iOS operating system and its multi-touch interface.

Internal accelerometers and gyroscopes can be used by applications to respond to the user shaking the device (one application is the undo command) or rotating it in three dimensions (one common result is switching from portrait to landscape mode or autorotation).

Apple initially adapted features from OS X to create iOS, but that cycle is now bidirectional. Many features on OS X 10.7 OSX Lion were implemented first in iOS, including application sandboxing, an OS X App Store (and the implied widespread third-party app code signing), the content-centric ("natural") scrolling direction, along with AV Foundation, Core Location, and a few other frameworks.

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It includes almost ten thousand libraries to help programmers scale projects. A popular alternative is Carthage, which is a decentralized dependency manager, meaning that it does not store a central list of available projects.

Use the tag cisco-ios for questions about Cisco's IOS operating system for Cisco network routers.

Please follow the article My App Crashed, Now What? by Ray Wenderlich, before posting any questions relating to app crashes. It explains how to properly debug an iOS app. It's pointless to ask questions relating to crashes when you don't have a proper backtrace and exception message.

Before you ask about custom controls: I want this type of control. Please visit cocoacontrols once. You will get lots of custom controls, animation, libraries and much more which is available in Swift and Objective-C.

Before asking about a topic, just search it in https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ also, which is the developer documentation provided by the apple which covers a lot of information regarding iOS development.

Resources

• iOS at Wikipedia (overview, history, features, built-in apps, etc.)
• iOS at Apple (updates, gallery, etc.)
• Developer Library at Apple (architecture, frameworks, media layer, core services, etc.)
• Developer Library to start development
• iOS Human Interface Guidelines
• iOS Design Patterns
• iOS Programming Course - AppCoda
• iOS Mobiletuts+
• Tutorials for Developers & Gamers from Ray Wenderlich
• [Code School Tutorials]Pluralsight iOS 9 Fundamentals
• Stanford University - CS193P - Developing Apps for iOS
• iOS Sample Codes
• WWDC Videos
• Apple Developer News
• What's New in iOS, from iOS 5.0 to iOS 11.0 (List of all iOS detail)
• Developer Resource download .dmg (Require Apple membership enrollment)
• iOS Design CheatSheet
• API Reference
• Awesome iOS - A curated list of awesome iOS ecosystem, including Objective-C and Swift Projects

Chat Rooms

Chat about iOS with other Stack Overflow users

• iOS/Android ChaosOverFlow
• iOS Developer Family

If you are moving from Objective-C to Swift, but you don't know anything about Swift, then you can convert your Objective-C code/project to Swift. Use the following third party link.

Related Tags

Platforms:

• ios4 ios5 ios6 ios7 ios8 ios9 ios9.2 ios9.3 ios10 ios10.1 ios11 ios11.2 ios11.3 ios11.4 ios12 ios13 ios14 ipados
• watch-os watch-os-2 watch-os-3 watch-os-4 watch-os-5 watch-os-6
• iphone ipad ios-simulator

Programming languages:

• objective-c objective-c++
• swift swift2 swift2.1.1 swift2.2 swift3 swift3.1 swift3.2 swift4 swift4.1 swift4.2 swift5 swift5.1

IDE:

• xcode xcode6 xcode7 xcode8 xcode9 xcode10 xcode11 xcode12 appcode

Frameworks & extensions:

• avfoundation cocoa-touch core-data core-image core-text foundation swiftui uikit watchkit
• cocoapods carthage
• today-extension imessage-extension combine

Distribution:

• itunesconnect app-store
• ios-provisioning provisioning-profile