What to learn in 2022 as an iOS developer?

Happy New Year! January it's the time when you might decide to go back to the gym again, eat healthily, be better. New Year, New You, and all that jazz!

If you're an iOS developer you might be wondering what you should learn and what skills you should focus on in 2022.

SwiftUI.

It's 2022 and SwiftUI has been around for almost 3 years. It has improved a lot! The first iteration was fun, ground-braking but quite limited.

The second iteration that supports iOS 14 had some major improvements! We can now do grids and way more cool stuff.

The latest release of 2021 really brought a lot of cool bells and whistles in SwiftUI. We learned how to NOT use UUID as an identifier, we got searchable modifier, we got markdown text and so much more!

SwiftUI is a technology of interest in the iOS market. More and more companies are looking to start implementing SwiftUI. You can for sure use it for your take-home project (ask your interviewer if it is ok).

Now is the time! And go above just basic fundamentals such as VStack, ZStack, and HStack. Learn more complex things such as TimelineView, GeometryReader, and Canvas. You can build such cool stuff with it!

Async-await.

If you have been awaiting a better way to do asynchronous operations in Swift, lo and behold ASYNC AWAIT!

Asynchronous operations and asynchronous programming is not a new concept in programming, however, we could not do it natively in Swift. At least it was not built-in in the language.

There are no excuses for you why you would not learn it! You can use async-await in iOS 13! It's just a matter of time until more teams get up to speed with that feature and very soon it might become a part of standard iOS interview questions as well. So get ready now!

Combine.

Combine came to life at the same time as SwiftUI. However, it came out pretty much ready for production and ready to use!

It's a great replacement for RxSwift if you don't want to have a dependency on a third-party library, the syntax is easy to understand.

Again, a lot of teams have a minimum version of support for iOS as iOS 13 so it's safe to say this technology might gain popularity.

You should have exposure to functional reactive programming in general. It's a good practice to have knowledge of such technology.

Diffable data source, Compositional view layout

UIKit has been getting some love too.

Compositional view layout is a new way to work with your collection view. Difffable data source will help you to get that smooth animation that is sometimes hard to achieve with the old way of doing UICollectionView.

UICollectionView is a great way to build a beautiful UI and it has a lot of flexibility! The minimum version is iOS 13 so again there are no excuses why not to learn it!

New to iOS development?

Is 2022 is the year when you start your iOS journey? It's a great time to start building and learning iOS development. As of right now you still have to learn UIKit and SwiftUI, especially if you want to land a job sooner rather than later. But seriously, iOS has come a long way! Swift is a mature and stable language, we have two UI framework that we can use, we have a native library to do functional and reactive programming! I can't wait to see what you're going to build with it! Go get them!