The 10 Key Updates Developers Need to Be Ready for in iOS8

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) earlier in June, the Cupertino company unveiled what Applico CTO Matt Powers called “one of the biggest platform updates Apple has ever made to iOS and Mac OSX.”

With lots of big changes coming, developers need to be ready for iOS8. So to help you prepare, here are ten key updates for developers that were unveiled at WWDC 2014.

1. Actionable Notifications

Allowing the user to respond and take actions on notifications is big step up from banners and alerts. This is a great feature for developers and also for users – no longer will we need to load up an app just to take a simple action.

Similarly, App Extensions, allowing widgets on the notification center and even the ability to present views from your app in another app, gives developers a new way to engage with users. But over-eager developers beware – not every notification needs to be actionable and not every app needs to have a widget in the notification center.

2. CloudKit

Over the years, Apple has continued to add deeper integration with iCloud, having gone from offering a simple online storage space for music and photos to saving custom app and user generated data. CloudKit is essentially the next evolution of the iCloud services for apps.

However, CloudKit is still lacking compared to other Mobile-Backend-As-A-Service (MBAAS) offerings. You still can’t write custom business logic on the backend or integrate with third-party services. The biggest issue is that it only supports iOS. This is great if you only want to build iOS apps – which is what Apple wants – but if you have plans for an Android or even a Web app, iCloud is not going to be sufficient. At Applico we partner with many different MBAAS to choose the right service for clients, and at this point, iCloud is at the bottom of that list.

3. Touch ID

Ever since Apple announced Touch ID on the iPhone 5s, we’ve been waiting for them to open up the APIs. Apps can now use the Touch ID for authentication instead of asking users to type in their login information every time.

Logging in and registering are such an integral part of every app that the introduction of Touch ID APIs opens up the opportunity for a completely new user experience. Combine this with saving user data on iCloud, and some of the biggest choices in app development, choosing a backend and authentication method, can now be handled inside of Apple’s ecosystem. This combination is a big step forward for Apple.

4. Swift

We all knew this was coming, we just didn’t know it would be in 2014.

Objective-C is one of the most difficult programming languages to pick up for those unfamiliar with programming. Apple has been progressively updating Objective-C to not only include the modern features available in other languages, but also to make it easier for new developers. Swift is intended to offer a lower barrier to entry for iOS (and even Mac OS) development for new developers.

There are still many things you can’t do with Swift that still require you to dive into Objective-C code. For those of you that have been programming in Xcode for many years, Objective-C is a hard habit to break and Swift can seem unintuitive and even confusing at times. Nonetheless, Swift is a promising change, even if it has a long way to go.

5. Metal, SpriteKit, SceneKit

Like Swift, Metal is Apple’s attempt at improving it’s app development community.

Metal is essentially Apple’s version of DirectX, read propriety graphics technology. Since the very first release of iOS, Apple has offered OpenGL as its standard for advanced graphics development. OpenGL has a strong developer community and is also available in Android. With the release of Metal, Apple is offering an alternative to OpenGL and supposedly closer access to the hardware layer. Along with the improvements to SpriteKit and SceneKit, this is great news for game developers, but it’s probably not so great news for open standards.

6. Beta Testing on the App Store

Apple reintroduced TestFlight to the world to enable developers to distribute beta software outside of iTunes Connect. While it is great that we can now beta test software directly from the store, we will also be losing the ability to use TestFlight for internal builds and crash reporting.

The beta releases also go through the App Store approval process, so this change is not ideal for internal builds. If you are using TestFlight for internal distribution, it may be time to start looking for alternatives.

Other Nice Additions:

7. QuickType

The ability to swipe keys and better word suggestions. Nothing new here, just an update to catch up to the other mobile platforms that already have this.

8. HealthKit and HomeKit

There is lot of talk about the potential for HealthKit and HomeKit, but that’s all it is right now. For the most part, Apple is just offering a central repository to manage health metrics and home automation. Most of the APIs are still pretty limited at the moment.

These additions will be bigger news next year, when there are more partners and more APIs exposed. But for now, HealthKit is just a collection of data, leaving the user to make sense of it, and HomeKit just doesn’t offer the flexibility or customization that you expect from a futuristic home automation system.

9. Messages

This feature and the next one don’t have much to do directly with development, but they are still game changers for iOS.

Apple’s Messages app now allows you to send audio, video and location messages, which puts it in direct competition with Skype and Hangouts. It also offers the ability to set time limits on those messages and send your location information to your friends, placing it up against Snapchat and Glimpse. It’s not unusual for popular services like this to get absorbed into the ecosystem of the core OS, but with this change Apple is making a play for the social and communication space in a big way.

10. Family Sharing

Apple announced that they will open up family sharing and allow users to share their iTunes purchases with up to six users. Apple will also give parents greater control over the apps their kids are downloading. While the parental controls are great, sharing iTunes purchases could have a negative effect on sales. It will be interesting to see how friends, roommates and other non-family members, take advantage of this feature.

So those are the big updates for developers in iOS8. With lots of exciting changes coming, we’ll be looking out for innovative new ways to leverage iOS8 to build apps for platform businesses. For more on iOS8, check out this review from Applico CTO Matt Powers.

Filed under: Product Engineering | Topics: apple, engineering, iOS, IOS 8, ios developer, ios development, WWDC