I've done iOS development for a school project, but it was haphazardly thrown together Objective-C. The app had memory leaks, so we had to make sure the professor didn't demo the app for longer than 5 minutes before the app crashed. I've been under the assumption that the problems of Objective-C that Swift solves was automatic garbage collection, but it seems to address a slough of other things first.
Any experienced SWEs who found value out of attending a bootcamp or structured course to fast track mobile app development? I've been able to pick up specialities in other software disciplines such as data science, backend, frontend from first hand work experience, but mobile app development is usually a silo where the teams only hire people who are already well versed in mobile app development. It feels like there are many platform specific quirks and instances of "you don't know what you don't know", so a bootcamp would at least steer you down the happy path and from there you can start branching out and considering the tradeoffs of the happy path.
Our team is making vendoring decisions between React Native versus Swift/Kotlin, the latter being outside our area of expertise to have opinions on.
We basically had to turn a mobile web design into a full app for a paid client. Somehow my manager had a lot of faith in me actually doing it when nobody else (including me) did. So under the pressure, I picked it up enough to build something of commercial value.
Things have become substantially more complicated since then. Back then, it was about wrestling with the IDE, Java, XML, SQLite, tablet designs. Today, it would be wrestling with architecture, tests, nested UIs, reactive programming, and most examples and tutorials being out of date in some weird way.
I do teach bootcamps and expensive week-long training modules, so feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions or need help with hiring. It's on the bucket list to actually write a good starter guide to native Android, just something I've put off for a while.
Also here's a really good (free) course for Android though, probably better than most of those: https://www.udacity.com/course/developing-android-apps-with-...
What you’ll find with a general purpose platform like react-native. Is you’ll spend 80% of your time debugging. Just random issues that affects iOS or android. And you’ll still need to understand ios and android architecture. There is no silver bullet. Tradeoffs... Just an excuse for web developers to avoid learning another language.