You need to do memory management, need to work
with design patterns, learn a new language, and more.
While he does raise some valid points (with which I still disagree, but then again I wouldn't be caught dead on anything by Apple, so I'm biased too), this is plain and simply nonsense. Assuming someone knows neither Objective-C nor any language (including HTML) for web development, the learning curve is probably about the same. Web development wold probably even be harder, since you need to deal with much more than 'just' Objective-C.
I would say iOS development is more front-loaded in the amount of things you have to learn before you can build even a simple app than it is for web development. The net amount of work might be less in the end (as you say, there are a ton of technologies to learn in web dev work), but you don't have to learn all of those at once if you want a webpage.
Totally agree with this. Once you get past a certain point the intrinsic complexity of the problem dominates, but the initial learning curve on Obj-C and Cocoa is definitely steeper. You can't just slap something together the way you can with PHP, for instance.
Can we all just agree that to be good at any technology, it is pretty darn hard? But I've done enterprise Java/.NET, web development,and iPhone development. If we are talking about what is easier for a beginner to pick up (some HTML/CSS/JS with something like Rails or Django backend), I would definitely recommend web development over Java/.NET/Obj-C.
..I feel a little differently. The thing that just drove me crazy when I first tried to learn web development (with rails) is that every so often, I would need to make a detour, and go learn some other technology (css, javascript, prototype, html,http etc) . Granted, that experience may have helped my learning curve for objc; But when I was learning to program for the iphone, I was up and running before I even fully realized that cocoa was different from objective c. Of course, I cringe when I look at objc code I wrote early on, but guess what? The people who purchased those apps know nothing about the underlying code.
It's considerably easier (IMO) to get started in web development than in iOS development. Web development has a fairly gentle learning curve and I personally know a bunch of people that started their careers hacking in php. iOS development has a gentle learning curve if you already know C, which even some CompSci graduates don't nowadays.
I don't think this was intended as a put down, it's just a fact that there are a ton of ways to put together a simple web app and some of them are very accessible.
A Web App is more than HTML and PHP of course. There is an entire "stack" and if you're doing it all yourself you need to know something about all of it. You will probably find yourself needing to be at least somewhat proficient in: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP/Ruby/Python or similar, Apache or IIS administration, Linux/BSD/Windows administration, MySQL/Postgres/SQL Server administration, some dialect of SQL itself, etc.
I'm not sure how that compares to iOS but my hunch is that you can pretty much confine yourself to learning XCode and the framework. The water may be a bit deeper right at first than just tinkering with HTML or PHP, but the overall domain appears to be more limited, at least so it appears to me (I have not done any mobile development yet).
My last iOS app required the knowledge of Objective-C, the frameworks, HTML, CSS, & Javascript (because that's actually how you do formatted text, and javascript for event handling within that text), SQL for the local storage, PHP & MySQL for the server-side storage, etc.
I'm not saying either is harder, I think that's a fight for cats, but I did want to inform to your hunch from experience.
I think both web development and iOS development require the use of tools and languages that many don't know about at the start, as I'm sure plenty of people think, "Oh I just have to learn HTML & Javascript" and then find all of the things you've listed.
> because that's actually how you do formatted text, and javascript for event handling within that text
I would say that CoreText is the preferred way to do it. WebKit is pretty slow by comparison and leaves you with much less control over your renders. It's not a horrible solution if you are trying to share assets with other platforms though.
The cost is what is prohibitive for many developers, which is why web apps are easier. I don't have to buy a Mac to make them, and any body can use them no matter what platform. I used to write Mac applications back in the day, but all my friends and relatives who didn't use Mac OS couldn't use them, I switched to web apps and yes I lost a lot of features, but I am reaching a wider audience. Have any IOS developers tried to port their app to Android? just for the challenge.
