MobilePro #62: Android Google Play improvements, what a superapp is, and .NET student zone
Welcome back to another interesting week in Mobile App Development! This edition is here with news from Android improving various aspects of Google Play, updates from Apple, Ionic Framework, and Microsoft.
This week, we have curated articles that showcase:
As always, check out our survey and tell us what you want us to cover - the MobilePro only works thanks to its community, so we need the community to tell us what it wants!
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Cheers,
Apurva Kadam
Associate Editor-in-Chief, Packt
What’s happening in Tech?
Android
Accurately Measure Android App Performance with Profileable Builds - Profiling the debug build may skew the performance and therefore it’s better to analyze the release build with the profileable tag enabled. With these tools provided by the Android team, you can make your app run faster and smoother.
Play it forward: Evolving our platform for another decade of developer success – Google Play is looking ahead to the next 10 years and thinking about the ways the platform needs to evolve. The company is launching tons of new features to help you build more sustainable businesses and improve the experience for everyone in the Play ecosystem.
Purchase optimization, flexible subscriptions, and revenue growth,- Google Play Commerce provides buyer support in over 190 markets. This year, developers can enjoy new purchase optimizations, more flexibility and control when selling subscriptions, and enhancements to monetization insights and programs aimed at boosting your revenue.
Raising the bar on technical quality on Google Play - App quality is the foundation of everything at Google Play. Android users expect a great experience from the apps and games they download, so the company is making higher-quality titles more visible on the Play Store, as well as steering users away from lower-quality ones.
Supporting and rewarding great Apps and Games on Google Play - Over the coming months, we’re rolling out enhancements to Google Play and Google Play Console that embed your key events, content, and offers across the Google Play experience. These changes are designed to help you reach more people, improve discovery of higher-quality titles, and optimize your presence for the greatest possible impact.
Keeping Google Play Safe with New Features and Programs - By responsibly evolving these features, policies, and programs, we’re able to help you safely launch new experiences to more than 2.5 billion users in 190 countries around the world. Today, we’re sharing a number of new features and programs to better partner with you and continue making Google Play a safe platform for everyone.
Apple
Releasing the Xcode and macOS hounds! - Xcode 14.1 includes Swift 5.7 and SDKs for iOS 16.1, iPadOS 16.1, tvOS 16.1, watchOS 9.1, and macOS Ventura. The Xcode 14.1 release supports on-device debugging in iOS 11 and later, tvOS 11 and later, and watchOS 4 and later. Xcode 14.1 requires a Mac running macOS Monterey 12.5 or later.
Ionic Framework
iOS Schemes and Android Variants support now in Appflow - Appflow, the mobile DevOps platform from Ionic, is excited to introduce support for iOS Schemes and Android Variants. Leveraging Appflow’s Custom Environments feature, you can now specify custom build settings using the Schemes or Variants already defined for your mobile application project.
Microsoft
Announcing TypeScript 4.9 RC – The company announced Release Candidate (RC) of TypeScript 4.9. Between now and the stable release of TypeScript 4.9, we expect no further changes apart from critical bug fixes.To get started using the RC, you can get it through NuGet, or use npm with the following command: npm install -D typescript@rc
.NET 7 Performance Improvements in .NET MAUI - General improvements in the .NET runtime or base class libraries (BCL) lay the foundation for the performance we are able to achieve in .NET MAUI.
Weekly Picks
Activity Embedding preview for large screens and foldables – Activity Embedding is part of Jetpack Window Manager version 1.1 alpha and contains APIs that help you to optimize apps on large screen devices by splitting an application’s task window between two activities or two instances of the same activity. Learn about Activity Embedding in this blog!
What Is a Superapp? – Are you a developer looking to building a superapps? Then this blog is for you! Superapps can consolidate and replace multiple apps for customer or employee use and support a composable business ecosystem.
How To Customize The React Navbar With Your Brand Info – Inserting your brand information in the navigation bar helps build your brand recall throughout your website. This article shows you how to do it in your React project.
Hybrid Vs Native Mobile App Development– The contrast between Native and Hybrid is not big. Let’s see the contrasts here. Are you in a dilemma about choosing Hybrid or Native technology for your business mobile application? Cheers! This article will be helpful for you to decide.
Best Hybrid/Cross-Platform App Development Frameworks for 2022 - In order to simplify the process of framework selection, we have shortlisted a few among the best of Hybrid App Development Frameworks especially for meeting to your project demands. Read about them here!
Watch Out for This!
Learn how you can accelerate your development by using Compose-specific tooling in Android Studio.
Mobile Dev Motivation
"People have enemies, app developers have bugs!"
-Anonymous
Tutorial of the week
Adding and constraining more UI elements
Drag an ImageView from the Widgets category of the palette and position it below and to the left of the CalendarView. When you place the ImageView, a pop-up window will prompt you to choose an image. You can choose any image you like, but for the purposes of seeing another Android Studio feature in action, choose the image from the top of the list, Avatar, in the Sample data section. Click OK to add the image to the layout. We will see in the forthcoming Making the text clickable section the effect of adding an image from the Sample data section has on our project.
Constrain the left-hand side of the ImageView and the bottom of the ImageView to the left and bottom of the UI respectively. Here is the position you should be in now:
Figure 4.25 – Constraining the left-hand-side and the bottom of the ImageView respectively to the left and bottom of the UI
The ImageView is constrained in the bottom-left corner. Now, grab the top constraint handle on the ImageView and drag it to the bottom constraint handle of the CalendarView. This is now the current situation:
Edited UI
The ImageView is only constrained horizontally on one side and so is pinned/constrained to the left. It is constrained vertically and equally between the CalendarView and the bottom of the UI...Read More
This how-to was curated from the book Android Programming for Beginners
👇 Hit the button to take a deeper dive into the world of Android! 👇
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Events and Conferences
Create your .NET portfolio in the .NET Conf student zone
Join the .NET Student Zone on November 7 to learn all about .NET and build amazing .NET projects! You will walk away with a project portfolio on your very own portfolio website – don’t worry, we will build it right along with you.
When: November 7th, 2022
React Global Online Summit
Learn how to How to improve web performance using latest React build with this summit!
When: November 8-9th , 2022
See you next week!