iOS development is the process of creating applications for Apple’s mobile operating system—the operating system used by the iPhone and iPod Touch. In this most fundamental sense, it has a lot in common with other types of software or app development, but there are a few key differences.
One of the things that distinguishes mobile app development from most other software is that, because apps are designed to run on mobile devices with more limited power, they rely on a network connection to take advantage of remote computing resources. To give one example: there are translation programs you can load onto a desktop computer and run locally, including their massive databases. By contrast, in a translation program written for iOS or another mobile platform, the installable software bundle—the app that lives on our phone—exists primarily to create a touchpoint for the user to interface with; the app sends a query to a remote platform that performs the actual translation, and the result is relayed back to the app for the user to read.
