At Appleās 2014 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), company executives unveiled iOS 8 and a whole host of new tools for mobile development firms. Many of those tools are aimed at making it easier to find and try apps in the App Store. For example, the App Store will soon support beta testing through Test Flight, app preview videos and app bundles.
The company is also opening up its mobile platform a bit. āThis is the biggest iOS release since the launch of the App Store,ā said Craig Federighi, Appleās senior vice president of software engineering. āThe iOS 8 SDK delivers more than 4,000 new APIs including amazing new frameworks, greater extensibility and a revolutionary new programming language.ā
That new programming language is called Swift, and itās designed as an alternative to Objective-C. Initial developer reaction to Swift has been very positive.