How Should a Beginner Properly Start iOS Development? Seeking Advice from Experienced Developers

I can tell you how I got into iOS development and try to answer some of your questions.

I started by trying to find tutorials online, but the ones I found were either too simple or did not explain anything properly. I even bought a course at Udemy but that course also did not go into the details as much as I had hoped. I finally stumbled upon the iOS course at Stanford: https://cs193p.stanford.edu

Back then it was available at iTunes U (which does not exist anymore), and included the lecture videos and the course work. I watched all the videos and, crucially, did all the course work. Doing the exercises was really essential because when you listen to the lectures it all sounds easy but when you try to do it yourself it's not so easy 😄

That course was exactly what I needed: it did not require any prior knowledge except for general programming, went into the details but explained everything. Definitely can recommend it if the videos are still made available, you will have to check.

To your questions:

Should I start with UIKit or SwiftUI? - That's not so easy to answer. I would say in the end you probably need both. Since in my opinion SwiftUI is more modern and cleaner, personally I would start with that. But if you want to focus on only one, you might want to start with UIKit, since it is still more capable and a lot of existing code is still based on UIKit.

How important is it to learn Objective-C - Not at all important, you can safely skip that. You will probably never write new code in Objective C.

What skills/topics should I master before moving to more advanced concepts? - That's really up to you. I would probably start with learning Swift and how to create UIs, since pretty much any app needs that. After that, learn whatever interests you.

What types of projects would you recommend for someone at my level? - I think the typical first app is a To Do app. It presents elements in a list, and you need to store the todos somewhere and be able to update them. And in SwiftUI, that is actually surprisingly simple, including persistence.

Which iOS-specific design patterns (MVC, MVVM, etc.) should I learn first? - That was actually one of the hardest topics for me. Even the Standford course did not go into architecture. The main problem is, architecture only becomes important in bigger code bases, and even more so when you work on an app in a team. But as a beginner, you typically work alone on small apps. Having said that, UIKit is based on MVC (or Apples interpretation of MVC), which can have a lot of problems. That's why there are so many alternatives. If that topic interests you, read up on it and try it out yourself. As for SwiftUI architecture, you might want to look at the IceCubesApp: https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp It is an open source Mastodon client, written completely in SwiftUI and explicitly meant as a best-practice example for a large SwiftUI app.

You're not the first to ask such question.

Answer here may help you: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/797977?answerId=855247022#855247022

With all the things you want to learn, that may take you more than 6 months full time to learn and master. So you should focus first on learning basics, like using Xcode (of course), Swift language and the basics of SwiftUI and UIKit.

Good material in https://developer.apple.com/pathways/.

Thank you for the helpful advice! I really appreciate you taking the time to guide me. I'll definitely follow your suggestions as I start my iOS development journey.