Ruby on iOS

The iPhone and iOS exceeded everyone’s initial expectations. In the past five years, independent developers and companies have published more than half a million products to the App Store that have been downloaded more than two billion times. But despite the huge influx of new developers and programming resources, the process of building iOS apps has remained fundamentally unchanged.

The iOS SDK was first announced in early 2008, nearly a year after the first iPhone debuted. Mac developers felt right at home since it used the same Objective-C/Xcode workflow that had existed on OS X for years. For everyone else, that day was probably the first time they heard the term Objective-C.

Objective-C is a robust language, but its verbosity and compiled nature are a bit out of step with the dynamic languages embraced by many of today’s developers. Since Objective-C’s inception in the 1980s, programmers have shifted toward Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. These “scripting” languages allowed some of the biggest websites in the world to grow and iterate with unparalleled speed by empowering flexibility and reducing complexity.

So, why haven’t we seen these languages prosper on mobile yet? I mean, that is why you’re here, right? The answer is that there have been no alternatives to Objective-C that allow for the trademark iOS user experience without compromising performance...well, no alternatives until now.