InfoQ Homepage Mobile Content on InfoQ
-
AirBnb Animation Engine Lottie Improves Performance by Adopting Core Animation
AirBnb has announced the fourth major iteration of its open-source vector-based animation engine Lottie. Thanks to the adoption of Core Animation, Lottie 4.0 provides significant performance improvements and reduces CPU load, says AirBnb iOS engineer Cal Stephens.
-
Apple Announces Full Swift Rewrite of the Foundation Framework
The Swift team has started to work on a new open-source implementation of the Foundation framework. To be written entirely in Swift, the new Foundation aims to improve performance by getting rid of conversion costs between Objective-C and Swift as well as to provide the opportunity for modularizing and clean it up.
-
Swift to Add Support for Ownership, Macros, and C++ Interop
The Swift language workgroup has detailed the main focus areas for the development of Swift in 2023 and further on, which include defining an ownership model for memory management, non-copyable types, a macro system, and C++ interoperability.
-
Apple Adds Core ML Support for Stable Diffusion on Apple Silicon
Apple released a set of optimizations to Core ML to enable running the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model on Apple Silicon-powered devices running the latest iOS or macOS versions, respectively iOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1.
-
Google Releases a Guide to Android App Modularization
Google has recently released a guide to Android app modularization. This guide is designed to bring best practices and recommended patterns for developers to build multi-module Android apps, focusing on mitigating problems that arise when the codebase grows, such as scalability, readability, stability and testability.
-
Google Launches Relay to Transform and Accelerate Android UI Creation
Recently launched in alpha, Relay is a design-to-code solution aiming to radically transform the way UI designers and UI developers collaborate to create Android UI components by removing the need for UI specs.
-
Porting Million Lines of Code from Java to Kotlin at Meta
Meta has been at work to port their Android codebase from Java to Kotlin. In the process, they have learned a number of lessons of general interest and developed a few useful approaches, explains Meta engineer Omer Strulovich.
-
How Slack Engineers Addressed Their Most Common Mobile Development Pain Points
In a rather detailed article, Slack engineers Ahmed Eid and Arpita Patel provided an interesting peek into the processes they adopted along the years to improve developer experience in a number of distinct areas and the tools they used to that aim.
-
AWS Amplify for Swift Reaches 2.0, Brings Async/Await and macOS Support
Previously known as AWS Amplify iOS, AWS Amplify for Swift now offers a rewritten API to support Swift async/await and make concurrency code more idiomatic. Additionally, the new release introduces beta support on macOS for a number of AWS features, including Auth, Storage, Geo, and others.
-
Safe Mode is Lyft's Approach to Handling Feature Flags Incidents
Feature flags are a useful tool to conduct A/B experiments and to roll out changes in a controlled way. To make sure that their use does not end up disappointing users when a change causes a crash or degrades the user experience, Lyft created Safe Mode, specifically aimed to prevent crash loops on launch.
-
Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile Enters Beta
Created by JetBrains to enable using Kotlin to build iOS and Android apps with native UI from a single codebase, Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile has exited the experimental phase and is now available in beta.
-
Android Gradle Plugin 8.0 Improves Build Times, Requires Updating Third-Party Plugins and Libraries
Google has announced the upcoming Android Gradle Plugin (AGP), version 8.0, reduces build times by removing the Transform APIs and replacing them through the Artifacts API and Instrumentation API. All third-party plugins and apps relying on them are required to migrate to the new APIs.
-
Meta Launches New Chromium-Based WebView for Android
Meta has been developing its own Chromium-based WebView for Android for a few years and has now started rolling it out to users of its Facebook app. The new WebView, which has not been open-sourced yet, improves security, stability, and performance, says Meta.
-
Android Studio Dolphin Extends Jetpack Compose, Wear OS, and Test Automation Integration
The latest release of Android Studio, dubbed Dolphin, improves Jetpack Compose screen previews, extends Wear OS support, and introduces Gradle Managed Virtual Devices to simplify test automation.
-
Swift 5.7 Brings New Generics Implementation and Reference Counting Improvements
Announced at WWDC 2022, Swift 5.7 is now officially available. It includes major improvements to the compiler internals, and many syntax and standard library additions, including String regex, concurrency updates, and more.