App developer insights
Insights and opinions from
the Adapptor app developer team.
Forced Update of Mobile Apps
In this article, Simon, one of Adapptor’s Senior App Developers describes how you can force users to upgrade your mobile app to the latest version — and when and why you would want to do that.
Test Like a Mother
Lessons learnt from motherhood applied to test mobile apps so they're ready for public release.
Totalitarian State Surveillance with the React Native Debugger
In an earlier post, we mentioned the React Native Debugger. Here we’ll take a glance at one of its easy to miss features, the Dispatcher, which falls right out of RN’s use of Redux.
Redux is “a predictable state container for JavaScript apps”, which is a bit of an undersell. Porridge for breakfast every Tuesday, and filing your taxes in October, is predictable — but Redux is predictably awesome.
Mobile App Development - Crossing the platforms, dotting the notation
A fairly light and high level look at mobile app development using cross-platform tools, aimed at a wide spectrum of technical and non-technical people. Including Apache Cordova, Swagger CodeGen, J2ObjC , Squidb, Flutter, and Progressive Web Apps. Originally presented at DDD Perth 2019.
Accessibility and React Native
An article that provides a few tips for adding accessibility features in a mobile app developed in React Native for Android and iOS, including how to prepare, some code examples and how to test.
When to question the UX
How, as a mobile app developer, to recognise when the cost of implementing a feature or design pattern doesn’t seem to be justified. It is the role of the developer to recognise this situation as early as possible and provide feedback to an iterative design process.
How to protect your codebase and deliver on time
When a development team, like our mobile app developers, are working on a software project, there is always going to be tension between the necessity to deliver your product and the desire to engineer your code to a high level of quality. This article explains how to make the balance.
Flutter: First Impressions
A dive into Flutter, Google's new UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled apps for mobile, including runtime and renderer, the Dart language, platform SDK, and tooling.
Punching holes in Android views
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can “punch through” a part of an Android app view in order to expose what’s behind it. While this might not be a very common UI paradigm, I’ve personally used it in the development of a production app — and it looked pretty neat!
Small Teams and Process
Lessons learned managing a team of mobile app developers in Perth. How to manage smaller app development teams and reduced process overheads.
Sum Types in Swift and Kotlin
An article exploring the differences in a sum type, a data structure used to hold a value that could take on several different but fixed, types between Kotlin and Swift. Another handy tip from one of our mobile app developers.
Mind the Gap
When it comes to mobile app development, while there are many cross-platform technologies vying for adoption, there remains one clear standout: Facebook’s own React Native.
ReactiveX - Is it worth it?
Dave, a Scottish developer at Adapptor in Perth, Western Australia, explores using ReactiveX, an API for asynchronous programming with observable streams for mobile app developers.
How We Built American Honey PlayPacks
How we rapidly developed a mobile app to iOS and Android while keeping feature parity in a complex app for Australia's American Honey product. Code sharing with native code enabled us to target both platforms without compromising performance along the way.