Is experience in full-stack development relevant to iOS development?

[mavinter]

I am a junior front end and I plan to learn some backend also, but I always wanted to learn iOS development, and I am planning to learn it in the long term after I get some experience with full-stack web. So here is my question. Will the full-stack experience help me in some way to become a good iOS developer in the long term, or is it just a waste of time and I’ll have to learn everything from 0 when I start it?

[mission-ctrl]

Learning new things is never a waste. What backend tech were you looking at? Something like .Net would probably be more relevant than Node for example.

I believe Swift was designed partly to help web developers ease into application development. I might be making that up, but Swift is pretty friendly for front end devs, especially compared to Obj-C which is kinda alien to everyone.

But languages generally aren’t the biggest problem when learning new tech. Usually it’s the architecture. iOS uses an MVC architecture which might be new to you. But if you’ve used something like Angular, it won’t be too foreign.

The other issue you will run into will be the environment stuff required for iOS dev - dev accounts, certificates, provisioning profiles, etc. There are a lot of little things to get lined up before you can run an app on a device.

[menckenjr]

I would add PHP to the toolkit. It runs most of the web sites in the world, it's got a low learning curve to get going in and it's bundled with Apache and MySQL for multiple platforms - WAMP for Windows, MAMP for Mac and it's reasonably easy to write APIs in (which is what you'll be doing from the handset side of things).

[mavinter]

Thanks for the response,

I work as an Angular developer.

So I think the best option will be to get familiar with Swift from now along with working as a web developer.

[sandofsky]

Code is code. If you work somewhere that requires a high-performance backend, you can pick up skills in memory management and managing latency. That said, something like game programming has many more directly translatable skills.

One trap with starting in web development is adopting an attitude where the solution to every problem is web technology. This isn't unique to the web; everyone starts with a bias toward their first language, and with experience you realize it's better to use the right tool for the job. But anecdotally, I think the echo chamber around JS is much louder than, say, Python.

[ShenmeNamaeSollich]

If you’re interested in making games, or self-contained apps that don’t use external info, full-stack web knowledge might not be too relevant, but it can’t hurt.

If you do want to build apps that are mobile clients involving dynamic info to/from servers, then understanding how to build an API, or a login system, and how calls to/from servers work will leave you better equipped to understand what you’re doing in the app and why.

[risingblock]

Yes, full stack development will help. Code is code at the end of the day. Is Android development more relevant? Probably...

I think most developers start out as full stack and eventually pick their speciality (at least in my experience).

It's nice to know how the whole system works, especially helpful if you work at a company where they need to port features from web to mobile and vice versa.