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iOS is the mobile operating system running on the Apple iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Use this tag [ios] for questions related to programming on the iOS platform. Use the related tags [objective-c] and [swift] for issues specific to those programming languages.

It should not be confused with i5/OS, which is one of IBM's operating systems for the IBM Power Systems (originally AS/400), or with Cisco's IOS (Inter-network Operating System).

iOS Latest Stable Release: iOS 16.3.1 (20D67) released on February 13, 2023

Latest Preview: iOS 16.4 RC beta (20E246) released on March 21, 2023

Latest Release News: News and Updates

iOS is a derivative of Apple's OSX desktop operating system, with which it shares many (but not all) common frameworks and other components. These include Cocoa Touch (the counterpart of the OS X Cocoa UI Framework), the Mach/Darwin/XNU kernel and code from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).

Applications for iOS are written for the Cocoa Touch framework (as opposed to OS X's Cocoa framework) using the same Xcode IDE for official use (i.e. for submitting applications to Apple's App Store) or using unofficial (mostly command-line only) toolchains for various operating systems (including Linux) for unofficial/jailbroken development. OS X is based on the Darwin-OS foundation, itself based on several Unix descendants. On June 2nd, 2014, Apple announced a new language, Swift, which could be used to develop apps for iOS. Swift was in beta until September 9th, 2014, and is, since September 17th, 2018, at version 4.2.0.

Each iOS application runs in its own secure sandbox to prevent (accidentally or intentionally) altering other applications, the operating system, or any other data. Since iOS 8, an iOS application can have extensions that extend custom functionality beyond the application. iOS is optimized for the power, graphics, processor, and memory constraints of mobile devices.

The user interface of iOS is based on the concept of direct manipulation through multi-touch gestures. Interface control elements consist of sliders, switches, and buttons, all included in Apple's UIKit Framework. Interaction with the OS includes gestures such as swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch, all of which have specific definitions within the context of the iOS operating system and its multi-touch interface.

Internal accelerometers and gyroscopes can be used by applications to respond to the user shaking the device (one application is the undo command) or rotating it in three dimensions (one common result is switching from portrait to landscape mode or autorotation).

Apple initially adapted features from OS X to create iOS, but that cycle is now bidirectional. Many features on OS X 10.7 OSX Lion were implemented first in iOS, including application sandboxing, an OS X App Store (and the implied widespread third-party app code signing), the content-centric ("natural") scrolling direction, along with AV Foundation, Core Location, and a few other frameworks.

Swift Package Manager or SPM is a dependency manager tool from Apple for managing the distribution of the Swift code. Introduced with Swift 3.0, it is slowly becoming the dominant dependency tool in Swift and Objective-C projects. The basic concepts of the SPM are:

  • Modules - Swift code are organized in modules that specify the namespace and enforce access control of the code.
  • Packages - are reusable components of code used in the projects and at the moment these languages are supported: Swift, Objective-C, Objective-C++, C, or C++
  • Products - library or executable
  • Dependencies - modules on which code in the packages depends on

It comes as a part of the Xcode IDE Swift packages or as part of the Swift toolchains. The source code can be found here.

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. It includes almost ten thousand libraries to help programmers scale projects. A popular alternative is Carthage, which is a decentralized dependency manager, meaning that it does not store a central list of available projects.

Use the tag for questions about Cisco's IOS operating system for Cisco network routers.

Please follow the article My App Crashed, Now What? by Ray Wenderlich, before posting any questions relating to app crashes. It explains how to properly debug an iOS app. It's pointless to ask questions relating to crashes when you don't have a proper backtrace and exception message.

Before you ask about custom controls: I want this type of control. Please visit cocoacontrols once. You will get lots of custom controls, animation, libraries, and much more which are available in Swift and Objective-C.

Before asking about a topic, just search for it in https://developer.apple.com/documentation/ also, which is the developer documentation provided by Apple that covers a lot of information regarding iOS development.

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If you are moving from Objective-C to Swift, but you don't know anything about Swift, then you can convert your Objective-C code/project to Swift. Use the following third-party link.

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