From the perspective of technology, this decade can be labeled as 'the decade of the smartphones'. With innumerable handsets flooding the market, vying to capture the attention, selecting the desired handset becomes quite a challenge. Right from Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows to Symbian, there are so many operating systems to choose from. Well, one of the most significant criteria for choosing an operating system is the user interface. Every operating platform boasts of certain unique features that make it stand apart from its market contemporaries. For example- in terms of the OS compatibility, iPhone takes away the market pie completely from Android. This is because iOS support for older handsets are much better and robust compared to Android. The new iOS 5 version offers support for iPhone 3GS which is almost there in the market for 3 years. On contrary, Android's Ice Cream Sandwich version just runs on just 2.9% of all the Android devices even after 6 months of its release. This is one particular reason why the market has witnessed a great drive to hire iPhone developers.
A few trends have been identified by the technology evangelists as something that has changed the domain of smart phone development not only terms of the nature of applications but also the job market. These are:
• Convergence of applications in the likes of voice, messaging, location based services, multimedia services.
• Monetization and software distribution strategies
• Use of technologies belonging to the four different categories such as web based technologies (HTML5 / CSS3 / JS), native platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile 7), Hybrid WebKit / Native, and Proprietary middleware
The main purpose of describing the trends is to understand the tremendous challenge that mobile application developers have to face while implementing all of them in the application. In the case iPhone, an application developer has to understand the potential of the platform and find out ways and means of implementing all the industry trends in the different versions of the iPhone. The challenge does not lie with only the implementation, but extends to adding value in terms of unique features. Therefore, an enterprise should always look forward to hire an iPhone developer who has relevant industry experience and has a keen understanding of the operating system.
iPhone is one of the biggest names in the smartphone market and this in turn is an enormous pressure on the iPhone application developers to constantly innovate and come up with out-of-the-box applications. As a result, enterprises want to hire iPhone developers who come with minimum 5 years of pure play mobile application development experience and a keen sense of business. The second attribute is of utmost importance because the iOS store is constantly being inundated with innumerable applications, and to make an application stand out, it is important to capture the pulse of the target audience.
Everything has two aspects to itself. The uniqueness of the iOS platform not only serves as an advantage but also poses certain challenges for the application developers. Some of these challenges are:
• Mastering technologies such as Cocoa, Objective C and Xcode takes time
• Controlling an application's memory utilization to prevent low memory warnings and terminations is tough challenge
• Proper handling of interruptions
• Avoiding crowded screens
So, it is clear that there are so many things that goes into an application development. This is specifically the reason why finding a genuine resource is extremely important. Therefore, an enterprise should always consider hiring an iPhone developer through outsourcing agencies because these agencies have a proper hiring framework.