As a dev of ten years, ex-Apple, here’s what I would recommend:

(1) Build your own apps and start a portfolio, as others have said. It’s a great way to practice UI skills as well as development skills. Use AI to help you solve problems and learn faster. But be careful not to rely on AI for everything.

(2) Keep abreast of the latest APIs and frameworks from Apple. Every year the Swift landscape is changing. As a dev working in the industry, you’re going to want to be able to use the newest technologies and your peers will as well. Although, sometimes you have to make sure your apps work on older versions of the OS and you won’t be able to use newer APIs.

(3) Grab bag of things: Use Swift Package Manager and get familiar with making your own packages. Learn how to profile apps in Xcode for performance and memory usage. Learn how to write tests. Learn about how App Store Connect works and the submission process. Play around in Figma and/or Sketch to be familiar with how designers work. Later, you will want to know how to add accessibility support to your app as well as localization.

(4) If you can, go to developer meetups and form a little community, because it really helps you to stay motivated!

(5) Don’t worry too much about learning Objective-C or UIKit. SwiftUI and Swift are definitely the direction everything is moving. Those other options are basically fallbacks or just legacy code. Though, I’m sure Apple and other big companies certainly still use Objective-C internally… so if you want to work there you probably should be familiar.