The iOS app market has grown tremendously since it’s inception just a few years ago. Because of the platform’s popularity, there’s a vast amount of resources available for anyone interested in the development process.

Whether you need help marketing your iOS app in the App Store or a way to design a beautiful iOS app yourself, you better believe there’s some tool, book, or community out there to help you do just that.

I’ve put together a list of libraries, services, communities, tools, and more that can help anyone involved with developing iOS apps or even thinking about making them.

Almost anything you need to do to create or manage an app for the platform can be handled with these helpful resources.

The List of Tools

IDE’s –

• Xcode: Best IDE for Objective-C, Swift & Cocoa products, made by Apple
• AppCode: JetBrains’ alternative to Xcode, very similar to IntelliJ IDEA

Xcode Plugins –

• Alcatraz: Xcode package (plugins, themes, templates) manager
• Cocoapods Xcode plugin: Dependency management helper for your CocoaPods, right in Xcode
• VVDocumenter-Xcode: Great tool for writing documentation, integrates perfectly with appledoc
• XCodeColors: Allows using colors in the Xcode debugging console (TTY). Works great with CocoaLumberjack
• HOStringSense: Working with strings made easy (especially for escaping chars)
• KSImageNamed: Autocomplete for imageNamed
• DerivedData-Exterminator: A magic button in Xcode to exterminate the current project’s DerivedData directories

Command Line Tools –

• Nomad CLI: World-Class Command Line utilities for iOS development
• Cupertino: Automate administrative tasks that you would normally have to do through the Apple Dev Center website
• Houston: Send push notifications from the command line
• Dubai: Generate Passbook .pkpass files with ease
• Venice: Secure your In-App-Purchases
• Shenzhen: Create development builds & then distribute them via TestFlight, HockeyApp, Amazon S3, or FTP

Project Analysis –

• Faux Pas: Faux Pas inspects your iOS or Mac app’s Xcode project & warns about possible bugs, as well as about maintainability & style issues

Dependency Management –

• CocoaPods: CocoaPods is the dependency manager for Objective-C projects. It has thousands of libraries & can help you scale your projects elegantly. Includes documentation for the libraries

Design –

• Sketch: Sketch is built for modern graphic designers, & it shows in every fibre of the app
• PaintCode: Design controls, icons & other graphic elements with PaintCode’s easy-to-use vector drawing tools
• Sip: The best way to collect, organize & share your colors

Images –

• ImageOptim: Nice & easy ui for pngcrush

Debugging –

• Reveal: Debug & inspect UI, see live changes without recompile
• Pony Debugger: Remote network & data debugging for your native iOS app
• SQLiteManager: SQLite browser

Source Control –

• Git: Widely used source control
• Github: Web based hosting service for git/mercurial/svn projects

Diff & Merge –

• Araxis Merge: Compare & merge changes in two updated revisions of a file with their common ancestor (or any other file)
• Kaleidoscope: Use Kaleidoscope to spot the differences in text, images, & folders

Crash Reporting –

• Crashlytics: Most powerful yet lightest weight crash reporting solution

Coding Style –

• Objective-Clean: Perform analysis of source code & points out styling issues

Sales & Analytics –

• AppFigures: Website with insights into iTunes Connect data (sales, purchases, trends, reviews & ratings, ads, …)
• Yahoo Mobile Developer Suite: Measure, monetize, advertise & improve your apps with Yahoo tools

I hope this list helps you adapt new iOS tools into your workflow. Cheers!