Apple apps

Price: Free

One cannot write about Mac apps without mentioning the ones made by Apple. Most of those mentioned below are preinstalled with macOS and the rest are free from the Mac AppStore. Free is definitely the best place to start.

Most of these apps are probably obvious for everyone, especially for developers but I thought I’d run through them for beginner to talk about how useful these free tools can be.

This is the foundation for all iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS developers. You either love it or hate it, but you cannot be indifferent to Xcode.

Xcode is the app you would use to write code probably in Swift or Objective-C, build your screens and submit your app to Apple. It is ever evolving, ever indexing and ever crashing.

My personal recommendation is to download it from the Apple Developers Portal. A free Developer Account is required to access to downloads page where you can get the latest beta of Xcode, and scrolling to the bottom will reveal “See more downloads” which will open a page where the release versions can also be downloaded directly.

This way multiple versions can be installed in parallel. The Mac AppStore version will be replaced automatically when updated, and from my experience with a corporate network, the update can get often stuck.