How long would it take me to create an IOS app with swift or xcode.

Simple games like swipe left and right to dodge objects

Nothing? Months, assuming you learn from the ground up. Depends how much time you have, could take a year if you have a demanding university/job schedule.

if you take to it, you can have a basic iphone game up and running in a matter of hours.

Just try to make an iPhone game and see how far you get in a day. You might not have anything compiling at the end or you might have the next Flappy Bird. Just go for it! What's the harm?

haven't seen you around in years. what dragged you back to jsp?

No good reason...just had a whim of visiting somewhere that wasn't Reddit and thought: I haven't been to d2jsp in forever. Looks exactly the same as I recall

So Swift is a programming language, and Xcode is an IDE by the way - not the same thing.

There are great free tutorials out there that will walk you through how to create a simple mobile application of that scale.