Creating an iOS/Android app?

[Misha]

Does anyone know how difficult this is to accomplish? I have an idea for a service that I want to see come to fruition, and if it's anything like creating a website, I would need some help.

[j03]

- Basic programming knowledge

- Learning how to put your idea of the interface into code

- Your best help is asking Google/some search engine, most likely Stack Overflow

- If you want, you can also make a topic asking in our programming help ([Only registered and activated users can see links]) section

Good luck!

[Bat]

The difficulty of creating apps for either device type largely depends on what you're trying build.

iOS development tends to require a lot more work if you're looking to build an app that isn't a game, music-playing, picture-taking or video-recording solution. There aren't a lot of guides for iOS development that break things down for you in contrast to Android. The ones I've seen for more complicated subjects generally assume that you either know exactly what you're doing in advance, or that you'll be using somebody else's library to get started.

Android has the opposite kind of problem. It's fairly easy to get started, and there are a lot of guides and tutorials, however you have to watch out for outdated solutions. The Android permission requirements and security restrictions have been changing rather hectically for the past 5 major builds. A guide on how to code something in 2017 may be obsolete today due to newly imposed restrictions or deprecated resources.

A "service" can mean multiple things in programming terms. Can you please describe what it is you would like your app to do? We may be able to point you in the right direction if we knew what you were looking to create.

[kuplu]

I don't have much experience with mobile dev, but I would speculate that the best shot for starting is learning Flutter/Dart. I really think this framework will be the next big guy in the industry because of its portability, perfomance (compared to React Native and Ionic), productivity (once you learn it, their marketing says you can build apps in record times) and I think Google will put a lot of effort to bring newcomers to their community, in other words, support.

Indeed, the CS50M (one of the Harvard's course that follows CS50) is taught using React Native, that's mostly why I think it's good to start with a portable easier language/framework. However, they're still very niche and Java for Android as well as Swift for iOS have much more to offer.

The first brief contact with mobile dev I had was with Android Studio/Java and, well, it wasn't that good (comparing to Flutter and even pure Unity).
tl;dr for me it was a looot more enjoyable and easy to start with Flutter/Dart (USING VS CODE S2 S2 S2) then Android/Java.