Multiple companies opt for Swift, as it offers 2–9x speed boost in addition to security, lightweightness, and interactive user experience.
The development of native mobile applications has a bunch of undeniable advantages: stable performance, enforced security, interactive and intuitive user experience, etc. As Apple continues to conquer the world with its state-of-art gadgets, app development companies compete to deliver systems that would be featured by the App Store.
Many of these tech firms utilize Swift as the backbone of the technology stack behind the apps for iOS-based devices, simply because this programming language was created by Apple. This article further examines what Swift is used for, and which industries it served a good job.
The origins and strengths of Swift
Developed by Apple in 2014, Swift is a programming language mainly used to create applications for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Swift is known for being clean and concise. According to the TIOBE Index’s list of most popular programming languages among mobile developers, Swift ranks 10 out of 20.
Security is one of the major benefits that Swift offers. It has inbuilt tooling for engineers to easily spot errors in the code. This contributes to significantly decreasing debugging time. Swift can also boast of its speed. For instance, Apple claims that Swift’s search algorithms are 2.6x faster than that of Objective-C and up to 8.4x faster than Python 2.7. In addition, the language uses fewer lines of code, which results in reduced release cycles.
On top of that, Swift developers can utilize the language for both front-and back-end development. Lastly, Apple has made the programming language open source, boosting its evolution through contributions from the community.
At the same time, Swift is a relatively young programming language. There can be little support for Swift compared to other technologies that are more mature. This also affects the learning curve. Apart from that, engineers may find working with older versions of Swift difficult, since the technology only supports iOS 7 and macOS 10.9 or higher.
Swift usage across industries
Numerous companies from different industries rely on iOS development with Swift.
In social media, Meta used Swift to put the Facebook app on iOS. The tech giant thought the language would be advantageous, since it allows the application and the server to communicate without a hitch. Furthermore, Swift promotes more flexibility when writing application programming interfaces necessary to connect to third-party services.
In transportation, one of the well-known apps is Uber. The company switched from Objective-C to Swift, because the latter is less prone to crashes. Currently, about 90% of the Uber app is coded in Swift. The other 10%—mainly libraries and packages of the code responsible for application support—still remain in Objective-C. In addition, Swift helped to simplify memory management, so that the mobile application no longer eats into the smartphone’s storage.
In the hospitality industry, Airbnb’s iOS app is written in Swift, mainly because it is lightweight and ensures decent security out of the box. Needless to say that Airbnb also actively contributes to the development of the programming language. The company released Epoxy—a suite of declarative APIs to build UIKit applications in Swift.
Many businesses would also benefit from building an app specifically for iOS. To do so will require a team of experienced Swift developers who can deliver quality work despite the complexity of the task. However, make sure the company you selected fully understands what the Swift programming language is used for.
