I make ios apps without touching obj c and am not "hindered" by not using obj c....depends on the app.
I use a game engine and write everything in C#, then it ports the entire code base to whichever platform you want to publish to.
If you're developing for ios, it outputs a folder that you open in xcode and compile to a native ios app. For android it serializes your project and sends it to android sdk and you get a native .apk of your app. Same for windows, web browsers, standalone pc and mac....
Write once-deploy everywhere is the motto for the sdk and it's fully extensible, you can code in C++ if you wanted, you can still write native obj-c code and use it in the engine for ios specific functionality, or java for android.
I'll make a video when I get to work showing what I'm working on this week, using computer vision on mobiles. I also make programs that use kinect sensor, oculus rift, etc and just about anything can be used with the game engine by the way it was designed to be extensible with 3rd party plugins and ones you make yourself.....
Also have been tying in Oauth 2.0 to the apps to incorporate social sharing API's and shit.
That seems very useful. Objective-C syntax is pretty weird compared to other OOP programming languages. What is this game engine that you're using though? Can you provide some details? It would be great to be able to code in a different language like Java.