mobile

Introduction If you ever stumbled, lately, on a tech article talking about Super Apps, it would probably mention that they were first invented  in 1999, by Mike Lazaridis, the founder of Research in Motion (RIM), the manufacturer of the BlackBerry device. Mike has defined Super Apps  as applications which make use of all the BlackBerry resources available. From usage of notification pop ups, context menu integration right down to being able to access any application from within anywhere on the device. Deep integration across the…

In most iOS apps, as app developers, we pay a very special attention to the user interface. For example, we try to perfectly implement the graphical design as proposed by the designer. But on the other hand, we pay very little attention to the other parts of the app such as the the data management or the network layer. In this article, I will explain why, during my last project, as we were trying to improve the unit tests of our network calls, we decided…

As I explained in the first part available here, I recently switched from Mobile development to WEB front end development. Last month has been full of learnings, let me describe them.

You are an adept of Android App Links and you find wonderful being able to suggest your users to install your application or to redirect them from your website to your application with specific data relative to their requests? Well, forget (almost) everything you know. Since Google I/O last week, Google released to developers what comes as the biggest news in the Android development world: Instant Apps. Instant Apps are applications that can be executed instantly, from anywhere, without having to be installed on your…

In modern Android development, there is a huge rise of advanced architectures like MVP, MVVM or Clean Architecture, crazy libraries like RxJava or Dagger and even new languages like Kotlin. But on most projects, theme and styles are still written in an oldschool way with no consideration on how to architecture them. But these XML are part of your code base and you should show them the same love you show to your Java Code.

In Android, asynchronous tasks are done to avoid long operations in the main thread. Android documentation gives a good advice to the community to avoid ANR (Android Not Responding): Therefore, any method that runs in the UI thread should do as little work as possible on that thread. In particular, activities should do as little as possible to set up in key life-cycle methods such as onCreate()and onResume(). Potentially long running operations such as network or database operations, or computationally expensive calculations such as resizing…

This article is the iOS counterpart of Romain's recent article on tracking code quality with Sonar on Android. The problematic remains the same: quality is often overlooked for mobile Apps and the cost of setting up a proper quality tracking environment is usually deemed too high. This article will focus on showing that, while the iOS platform is not as tooled as Android, it's now fast and easy to track code quality on iOS projects. Even though this has been possible in the past mostly…