Proper Architecture For Ios Connecting To Database?

I'm a web developer who is moving into creating mobile (iOS/Android) applications. As such, what I'm trying to understand is how should I architect the mobile application to access

Solution 1:

1. Connect through an API (perhaps restful HTTP API).
2. Don't hard code SQL. Instead, make API calls, passing parameters.
3. Yes, send authentication information with every request and use HTTPS, or send username and password on first request only and get a session token and use that on subsequent requests, but still use HTTPS.
4. Consider sending and receiving data in JSON format.