I know this is a real beginner question to which most will probably answer that it depends on too many factors.
But assuming the following: you’re in your 20s, total beginner when it comes to coding, fairly tech-savvy, it’s been fairly easy to learn the basics of HTML, CSS and Bootstrap so far. You want to create an app for iOS and Android that is an interactive game. The user should be able to see animated objects and also have the ability to alter these objects or to move them around via the touch screen.
I don’t have the knowledge or the experience so far to know all the skills you need to be able to create an app like that. Can anybody with experience shed some light on what this path from total beginner to creating your own app would look like?
You need to learn object oriented programming - you need to learn how to code for both ios and adnroid as they have different programming requirements (but I think there’s a programming platform that allows you to write one program that compiles to both of them)
It takes as long as you’re willing to put in the work - the more time you will put in a day the less time it will take
By learning C# and Unity, you can reduce the amount you have to learn in order to make games for Android, iOS, and more. To make the entire game, you’d also have to learn how to create your graphic and audio assets. You can find a lot of starter material on YouTube, and there’s a lot of great stuff on Lynda.com, if you can swing an account (check your local libraries, as they sometimes offer subscriptions).
Although there are tools that can convert an HTML5 Web app to Android and/or iOS, they’re not really ideal and won’t provide the performance that a natively-written Android or iOS app would.
I don’t know much about iOS (I’m not an Apple user at all) but I do know that it uses Swift, which you need to learn in order to develop for it. For Android, you need to learn Java and really know it well, along with object-oriented programming concepts and concurrency. To get started with Android, you need to download the Java JDK and the Android SDK, and from there you can build an app with Android Studio (the Google-supplied IDE for Android). And although you can use the SDK-provided emulators if you don’t have your own actual Android device, I’d highly recommend acquiring an actual device, because it makes the development & testing process so much faster & easier.
Java’s not a “hard” language to learn per se but if you don’t already know it, it’s going to be quite a bit more challenging than HTML or CSS which are a walk in the park by comparison. I’d allow a minimum of 6 months to really learn Java to the point where you can build an Android app and not mess anything important up.
And as already pointed out, creating visual & auditory assets is another entire thing by itself.