2 similar iOS apps - what's the best way to manage them?

Question

I currently have one iPad app, but it now needs to become two. The second one will be more or less the same as the first with only the addition of a login screen and the removal of some information on the home screen (and other minor adjustments). The vast majority of both apps will remain the same. The app in general is quite large and complex.

So... My question is what's the best way to manage this? Are we talking multiple targets in the project? A tracked branch in git? Perhaps an Xcode workspace with multiple projects?

The aim, of course, is to minimise instances where I have to change/add the same code in both apps in the future and yet to make it easy for any developer to build either version of the app.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

This is a very similar problem to this common one , where you have a Full and Lite app version that share a majority of their code.

I'll also post a link to this tutorial , which I didn't see linked to in the other stack overflow question I referenced. The tutorial is for Xcode 3, but it's not too hard to use the same concept in Xcode 4.

Yes, I would use two Targets in one Xcode project.

Answer 2

I'm no expert on this, but I would probably duplicate the project and then like you said, have a workspace with both projects. You could have 2 tabs open with each header file from the project and compare both of them and edit accordingly. Again, no expert at this, but good luck!