How Apple's App Accelerator is helping developers create innovative iOS apps

The nationwide lockdown post-COVID-19 outbreak witnessed an unprecedented surge in the online grocery orders in India. With consumers shopping on online grocery platforms using their bank and card details, a quick and secure sign in was the need of the hour. The 'sign in with Apple' on the Bigbasket application on iOS platform helped provide a seamless experience. "Especially during the COVID times, a quick sign-up flow helps consumer experience," says Tejas Vyas, Product Head, Bigbasket. BigBasket was already closely associated with Apple's App Accelerator for developing this feature, and the feature happened to roll out during the pandemic. Apple has been helping BigBasket in suggesting technology integrations and user experience guidelines for the Bigbasket iOS apps. "This has been in the form of enabling interactions between the bb Design/Product teams with the iOS usability experts. These insights are helpful for bb to understand key areas of improvement and make relevant additions to its iOS app roadmap," adds Vyas.

Turned three this year in March, Apple's App Accelerator in Bengaluru has been supporting Indian developers to create innovative iOS apps. The platform provides specialised support for developers, including tools and best practices to enhance their skills and transform the design, quality and performance of their apps on the iOS platform. "Apple's App Accelerator provides access to know-how, critique and mentorship around app design, performance and quality, for enterprising app developers. It supports app developers to build apps for the vast iOS ecosystem, including iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, among others.  With guidance from the Accelerator, app developers can adopt Apple frameworks better and swifter. More importantly, the app developers benefit from the vast ecosystem that Apple has, including the global developer community that comes together at the WWDC - Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference," says Prabhu Ram, Prabhu Ram, Head-Industry Intelligence Group, CMR.

A team of technology evangelists guide developers and the technologies they cover in India include general iOS frameworks and dev tools, iOS core tech, design, localisation and watchOS. For instance,  this platform helped ShareChat enable dark mode which gives users options and ultimately reduces battery consumption. The app also enabled other features such as rich notifications and reply to notifications which helped enhance the experience even more. "The team at Apple has helped with the focus of key areas to better the user experience of the ShareChat app. The Apple team helped with reviews before we launched it and that was very helpful in avoiding last-minute surprises," says Venkatesh Ramaswamy, VP of Engineering, ShareChat.

According to Apple, India has one of the most vibrant and exciting iOS developer communities, with tens of thousands of developers who have already created nearly 100,000 apps for the App Store worldwide.