[makaio]

Objective-C is a fine language and is pretty easy to learn. Nevertheless there are a few advantages to RubyMotion for certain developers:

* No XCode. Getting comfortable with Xcode takes time and I frequently hear people complain about it crashing, being bloated, etc. With RubyMotion you can just use your regular text editor and a command line.

* Ruby. While Objective-C isn't bad, I actually enjoy using Ruby. I'm much more likely to refactor and abstract functionality.

* Third-party gems and code: While there are limitations, it is generally pretty easy to use gems and other ruby code in RubyMotion. From what I understand, you can also call out to third-party Objective-C libraries from within RubyMotion, so you don't lose out on that ability.

* REPL: Using a terminal and the simulator you can interact with your code while its running.

[ctide]

I wouldn't recommend using a regular text editor and dealing with the iOS APIs. I pretty much despise IDEs, but sadly the objective-c paragraph long method signatures require it. That's actually why I didn't even bother with RubyMotion, it doesn't solve the thing I hate the most about objective-c.

I just use AppCode, with Xcode for interface builder and dealing with things like data models. It's closest enough to something that isn't a total piece of shit so that I can avoid slitting my wrists all day.

[Argorak]

Having a text editor does not mean that completion does not work. ctags etc. provide such features. It might not be as good as completion using a static type checker and might have false positives, but "uninformed" completion goes a long way.

Also, some of the higher level api look much more Ruby-like: https://github.com/rubymotion/BubbleWrap