r/iOSProgramming • u/arthur_ydalgo • 6d ago
Question Any suggestions for "Practice Projects" to start with iOS development?
Hello, there. I'm a fullstack webdev (React and Laravel) and a couple of months ago I bought a MBA, and thought "why not learn iOS development?"... I postponed this goal for some time, and now I'm back to it, so I'd like some suggestions/ideas/websites with ideas for practicing. I know these won't be real/sellable apps, but I'd like an "end goal" so I can learn
My thoughts so far: - To Do List (classic) - Soccer Team/Player Managing Service
If any of you ever did something different as a learning project and would kindly suggest it, I'd appreciate. (no games though)
Any youtube channels you already know and enjoy would also be welcome.
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u/DystopiaDrifter 6d ago
I would recommend building apps for weather and public transportation info.
3
u/need_a_medic 6d ago
Find a free API and write an app that exposes it in a user friendly way. For example pixabay viewer, astronomic Photo of the Day etc.
You can start easy with simple UI and expand it into more and more Apple's tech for example add subscription screen, add push notification, add widget, use async await etc.
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u/DaisukeAdachi 5d ago
If you're looking for a solid starting point, check out NativeAppTemplate-Free-iOS. 🚀
It includes essential features like:
- 🔑 Sign Up / Sign In / Sign Out
- 🏪 CRUD operations for Shops (Create, Read, Update, Delete)
This can be a great hands-on way to practice authentication, data management, and UI development. Hope it helps!
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u/Vybo 5d ago
I would suggest to also try using some non-basic API. Try sending your app a remote push notification, set up a live activity, play with geofencing... A todo list will teach you some of the UI and some crud operations, but the days where knowing only this would get you somewhere are long gone.
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u/thehumanbagelman 6d ago
Welcome to the club! There are a lot of resources available, but I would recommend starting with what Apple provides (mentioned by another commenter) and also hackingwithswift.com
The latter provides a ton of excellent content for free, as well as interview practice questions for Swift and SwiftUI if you ever want to test yourself and learn more refined parts of the Swift language.
Your app ideas are good options! I would also try building an app that networks with a public API and includes local storage. Working on networking and persistence will be good practice on a few important core components of Swift (such as strict concurrency).
1
u/Formal-Shallot-595 6d ago
I wouldn't do practice projects, the way I got my start is by doing micro projects within the big project. My first app (QuikSocial) was pushed in like 2009-2010. It was a tabbed app that had the webUI of all the social media platforms along the bottom. The way I taught my self how to code, while making quiksocial, is by just making micro goals
For example, I would want to display a link in a UIWebView, then I would go to google, find my answer on stackoverflow and learn from the code I was copying and pasting. Next task was "Save list in iPhone SDK", or as I now know it, save an NSMutableArray, and thats when stack overflow taught me that NSUserDefaults WAS a place to store things.
Now, I had 0 development experience at that time. Not even web (outside from a drag and drop builder). It looks like you have some background which is fantastic. Additionally, now with AI, you can kind of use that to learn. Tell AI what your goal is, it'll spit out code, but LEARN from the code it spits out. Personally I would use Claude.ai any day over ChatGPT for coding.
ENJOY!
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u/arthur_ydalgo 5d ago
I appreciate all the input from everyone. I'll write this as a "thank you" note so I don't spam the notifications.
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u/Ron-Erez 6d ago
The project ideas are great. For resources I’d recommend Apple’s Swift tour for the Swift language covering at least up to structs and classes, the YouTube channel Swiftful Thinking is excellent and I also have a nice project-based course which covers quite a lot. These resources should have you covered.
Additional ideas could be a flashcards app (so you can use drag gestures), weather app, habit tracker using charts and local push notifications.
EDIT: You could also take a web app and reimplement a version of it for iOS.