iOS Application Development: New with Agentic Coding and SwiftUI (WS 2026/27)

In this course, you will learn to develop applications for Apple's family of devices. We focus on mobile apps for the iPhone, but also touch upon Macs, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro.

Two things are new this year: First, we are introducing Agentic Software Development, which has rapidly become the industry standard. You will learn how to create robust, maintainable apps with the help of coding agents, but also the fundamentals of the Swift language and Apple's SwiftUI framework, so you can verify and understand what the code is doing.

Second, we focus on using SwiftUI. This is Apple's modern, declarative framework in the style of React Native and JetPac Compose. It lets you write apps for all Apple devices using a single user interface toolkit. Apple designed it from scratch with the modern Swift programming language in mind. It follows many modern software development patterns, making it an ideal subject to learn how to design such SDKs today. Covering the wide variety of devices with a single UI toolkit is also an interesting challenge from an HCI and software engineering perspective. We will also briefly introduce Apple's original UIKit SDK so you can find your way through existing codebases.

• At the end of the course, you will be able to implement full iOS apps with and without the use of coding agents.
• You will know the concepts and syntax of Swift and SwiftUI, which are also today's language and UI framework of choice for developing apps for macOS, watchOS, tvOS and visionOS.
• You will understand the particular technical and design challenges of developing for mobile devices.
• You will be able to design your apps with a look and feel following Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.
• You will learn to use both Apple's original UIKit and their modern, declarative SwiftUI framework to develop iOS apps.
• Your implementation will use recommended design strategies like MVC / MVVM, delegation, and target-action.
• You will learn how to use many of the key iOS SDKs like Foundation, SpriteKit, MapKit, AVFoundation, etc., and how to pick up more SDKs as you need them.
• You will know how to make your apps interactive with animations, multimedia, graphics, sensors, etc.

You need a Mac running the latest versions of macOS and Apple's free Xcode IDE to participate. Xcode's device simulator is usually sufficient, although for some projects involving particular sensors or other hardware a recent iPhone is necessary. We have a few Macs and iPhones available for loan.

This course has limited seating. You need to register to obtain a seat in this course. See the registration guide below for more information.

Prof. Dr. Jan
Borchers

Lea
Schirp

Karl
Deilmann