iOS is a mature and evolving operating system. With each new release, Apple updates its software development kit (SDK) and developer tools. These have become increasingly complete and sophisticated, giving developers the necessary tools to make their applications unexceptionable in the Apple App Store review process and furthermore by the users, who eventually decree the app’s success.

This book is a guide to help the reader get acquainted with Apple’s tools to move from the alpha version of an app to a stable and optimized version ready for the App Store submission process.

A deep knowledge of Objective-C and its internals is not required, but a good understanding of iOS development is definitely needed, since many of the topics assume the reader is at ease with the language and with mobile development (including memory usage, central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) usage, and energy consumption.) The authors use a sample application throughout the book. Readers are invited to fork the source code from GitHub, and follow the examples and complete the optimizations themselves to learn the techniques explained.

The first chapter is an introduction to the book, with an overview of its content. In chapter 2, the reader gets acquainted with the main tools of the trade: Xcode 4 (integrating Interface Builder) and Instruments. The subsequent chapter provides the instruction to fork the source code of the project, and walks through its first build. The next three chapters focus on the topic of diagnosis: memory management, core animation, networking, caching, and power management. These are the most interesting chapters of the book and they are worth reading more than once, keeping Apple’s documentation handy for reference. After taking the app to an alpha state, the next chapter shows how to distribute a beta version of the application, followed by a detailed description of ways to handle the test phase with crash reports and the like. The next chapter covers automating both normal builds and distributable beta builds. The last three chapters diverge a bit from the rest of the book. Chapter 10 discusses migrating the app to a universal binary for both the iPhone and iPad, while chapter 11 shows how to extract reusable libraries from the project and statically reference them in other projects. The book closes with an excursus on Xcode 4 key bindings and shortcuts that smooth the day-by-day workflow.

This book adds an arrow to the iOS developer’s quiver and I would suggest it to anyone starting into Xcode development.