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iOS Swift Basics An Introduction to Swift Programming Variables

Am I on the wrong track?

I am interested in building apps for Apple products as I have an IPhone however I do not have access to a Mac at all times. I will be mainly using a Windows Surface Pro but I also have an iPad. Am I able to download the software on an iPad or should I be following another track?

3 Answers

If you want to make apps for Apple products such as iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Mac, you will need a mac, because the software that is used to program these apps is called xcode and it only runs on macOS.

Brendan Whiting
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Brendan Whiting
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 84,738 Points

You might look into React Native. It will let you develop cross platform, and it looks like you can use a tool called Exponent described in this thread when you actually want to do a build: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/5ezua7/can_i_build_an_ios_app_with_react_native_without/ https://expo.io/ (I haven't used it myself).

As a side benefit, you'll be learning web technology that is useful for a lot of other things besides building mobile apps. But there are some trade-offs between React Native and Swift: https://www.quora.com/Which-one-is-better-to-use-React-Native-or-Swift

If you want to go the React Native route, I recommend doing the Front End Web Development track, but you can stop when you get to JQuery. Then you should do most of the Full Stack JavaScript track. You need to know npm and ES6, but you don't necessarily need to get into the backend stuff, although it's useful as a lot of apps have backends. After that you can jump into the React track. Treehouse has a workshop on React Native, but I think it might be a bit out of date, so when it actually comes time to learn React Native you would probably have to use other resources.