Best app language for a beginner

[sahxtan]

Hey guys,

 

I'm looking to learn an app language solely for iOS but I'm also open to something cross-platform(android). Initially, I would like to develop a couple of apps but I don't want to spend any money on outsourcing, I'd rather spend that money on educating myself. So, I don't know where to start.

 

I know basic HTML and CSS. 

 

Thank you for your time.

[Brooksie359]

my friend does some android app development for his major and he says java is currently one of the most widely used and that is what he is using to program an android app at the moment. 

[sahxtan]

39 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

my friend does some android app development for his major and he says java is currently one of the most widely used and that is what he is using to program an android app at the moment. 

 

Yeah, I've heard Java is the way to go for android.

[fizzlesticks]

If you only want to do iOS use Swift, if you want to do both iOS and Android use C#. For Swift and basic iOS devery watch the Stanford iOS 10 course on iTunesU. It assumes you already have programming knowledge tho, so you'll need to learn the basics first.

[Dat Guy]

1 hour ago, sahxtan said:

I'm looking to learn an app language solely for iOS but I'm also open to something cross-platform(android).

You can do that with C# (Xamarin), Delphi, Lisp (mocl) and Python if you wish. But I can't recommend you to use Python for that.

[Gwion101]

Personally not a fan of cross platform app dev. It's alright for basic apps but when you need to use more of the low level components of the os it gets a little messy. Games are a bit of an exception here, with game engines like Unity3D being very versatile. 

 

For iOS the common practice is Swift with apples Xcode IDE and For Android Java in Android Studio or Eclipse (Eclipse being not so common these days).

If you were looking at developing basic mobile apps that don't use features like camera/storage/accelerometer etc then you could use cross platforms like Cordova or PhoneGap to quickly whip up an app using HTML/CSS/JS.

 

Note: Development of a backend would be required if you intend to persist/process data online (food for thought).

 

I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with too much info, it's not as scary as it sounds and the majority of tools out there have grate support communities to assist you.

[iNyx]

3 hours ago, Gwion101 said:

If you were looking at developing basic mobile apps that don't use features like camera/storage/accelerometer etc then you could use cross platforms like Cordova or PhoneGap to quickly whip up an app using HTML/CSS/JS.

Actually, Cordova (PhoneGap is another Cordova distribution) has plugins exactly for Camera, Storage, Accelerometer, Location, etc... even Push Notifications and many others developed by the community.

I used almost every Cordova plugin and I'm confindent in saying that those works great even on the most awful chinese android knockoffs

[Gwion101]

12 hours ago, iNyx said:

Actually, Cordova (PhoneGap is another Cordova distribution) has plugins exactly for Camera, Storage, Accelerometer, Location, etc... even Push Notifications and many others developed by the community.

I used almost every Cordova plugin and I'm confindent in saying that those works great even on the most awful chinese android knockoffs

You're absolutely correct, you can access the majority of a phones features via plugins, however, from my experience working on a past Cordova project, it felt like we spent more of the time fiddling with the accelerometer plugin than, the actual project itself. To be fair that was back in 2013/14 and I expect Cordova has improved significantly since.

 

As I said, that's more my personal preference, I'd just rather build native myself.

[Ximalas]

On 19.4.2017 at 8:48 AM, sahxtan said:

Hey guys,

 

I'm looking to learn an app language solely for iOS but I'm also open to something cross-platform(android). Initially, I would like to develop a couple of apps but I don't want to spend any money on outsourcing, I'd rather spend that money on educating myself. So, I don't know where to start.

 

I know basic HTML and CSS. 

 

Thank you for your time.

Maybe I'm just "oldskool", but I suggest you start learning the basics of any system programming language: variables, constants, conditionals (if and else), loops, functions/procedures/methods, and aggregate datatypes (struct/record/class). I fear diving into pure event driven programming (languages) will hide vital knowledge any programmer should know.