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Development of mobile applications *

Android, iOS, Windows Phone and so on

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Hypercube. How we gave developers test devices without losing any

Reading time 11 min
Views 4.9K
You can’t properly test and debug mobile apps without test devices, which there should be plenty of considering how the same code may behave differently on different models. So how do we keep track of these devices? How do we quickly provide developers and testers with the smartphones they need, configured the way they need, and without much red tape?

I’m Alexey Lavrenuke. Over the years, I’ve worn many hats: one of the authors behind Yandex.Tank, a speaker on load testing, and the guy who calculated energy consumption by mobile phones. Now I’m a Yandex.Rover developer on the self-driving car team.

After the phones and before Yandex.Rover, there was Hypercube.

A few years ago, the head of mobile development popped in to the load testing department and mentioned a problem they were having with test devices: phones had a tendency to inexplicably migrate from one desk to another. Picking the right device and then finding it had become a challenge. We already experienced working with mobile devices from building a digital ammeter to calculate energy consumption, so we decided to help our coworkers out and quickly rig up a handy contraption. We figured the whole thing wouldn’t take more than three months. Oh how wrong we were. Let me tell you what we were really in for.


''Dallas cube''
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Total votes 13: ↑12 and ↓1 +11
Comments 2

Hidden mistakes with Shared Element Transitions

Reading time 4 min
Views 9.1K


There is a good practice to make your application beautiful and live, and nowadays there are a lot of tools and ways to achieve this. One of them is Shared Element Transition.

In this article I’ll cover a few mistakes which have cost me a lot of time; I’ll show how to avoid them if you decide to implement this kind of transitions with Fragments on application.
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Total votes 13: ↑13 and ↓0 +13
Comments 4

Uber & Careem merger: How the emerging taxi hailing services will affect in MENA region?

Reading time 4 min
Views 2K
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Managing your competition is an important skill that you need to have as a company. The management of competition can either be done by letting go of a market because it is too much to handle. You can also consider either selling yourself to a competition in a particular local market or acquiring them. Different companies adopted varied strategies according to the moment’s and the market’s demands.

Focus on Uber

Uber needs no introduction as a corporate or as a service provider. It has become synonymous with on-demand cab services and is slowly progressing towards providing many other services in the same fashion.

The phrase ‘Let's book an Uber’ has become common. In a decade, Uber has gained the status of a monopoly and has marked a prominent presence in more than 70 countries ever since its inception in 2009. However, it hasn't always been a bed of roses for Uber.

Uber has faced a lot of legal issues, some of them because of the legislature of the country, local drivers and passengers.
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Total votes 16: ↑15 and ↓1 +14
Comments 0

9 Ways to Fuel Up the Mobile App Developer’s Efficiency

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.1K
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In general, the productivity of coding superheroes is measured by the number of lines of code and the quality of the code they write. It means, when the developer churns out the output compared to input, they are declared as productive. Presently, every company wants a productive programmer to accelerate time-to-market and enrich mobile app user’s experience that helps them stand ahead of the competitors.

Alas! All the developers are not productive. Most of them, pull their hairs when the deadline is around the corner, when finding the source of bugs seems a hard nut to crack in, or when the client is complaining about the features not meeting the business needs. The reason behind for not performing to the peak efficiency is they work hard, but not smartly.

The developer’s productivity can be augmented when they work prudently, make the most out of the time, and incorporate the best practices.
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Total votes 12: ↑11 and ↓1 +10
Comments 0

Security of mobile OAuth 2.0

Reading time 12 min
Views 14K
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Popularity of mobile applications continues to grow. So does OAuth 2.0 protocol on mobile apps. It's not enough to implement standard as is to make OAuth 2.0 protocol secure there. One needs to consider the specifics of mobile applications and apply some additional security mechanisms.

In this article, I want to share the concepts of mobile OAuth 2.0 attacks and security mechanisms used to prevent such issues. Described concepts are not new but there is a lack of the structured information on this topic. The main aim of the article is to fill this gap.
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Total votes 34: ↑33 and ↓1 +32
Comments 0

How Moovit improved its app to help people with disabilities ride transit with confidence

Reading time 4 min
Views 814

Alexandr Epaneshnikov, a 19-year-old Russian student who is legally blind, recently decided he wanted to be more independent by commuting on his own and relying less on his mom for rides to school. It meant taking a streetcar to a subway to his high school in Moscow, a 30-minute trip that Epaneshnikov assuredly navigates with a cane and Moovit, an urban mobility app optimized for screen readers.


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Total votes 15: ↑15 and ↓0 +15
Comments 0

Top 5 mobile app development companies in the UK

Reading time 3 min
Views 2.3K
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According to Evans Data Corporation, there are 12 million developers in the world. About 350,000 of these software and mobile developers work and live in the UK including freelancers and IT employees.

How do you choose the best one among all this variety? The obvious answer — get going with a professional IT company. This will increase your chances to work with true professionals.

I’ve made my own research based on a variety of reliable resources like Google SERPs and user’s reviews, different independent media, including medium.com and aggregators, like businessofapps.com, Clutch, etc. and other independent sites. Based on the collected data, I’ve aggregated the total score for each of the 25 leaders, and here I represent a list of the winners: the top 5 software developers in the UK.
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Total votes 12: ↑12 and ↓0 +12
Comments 1

Improve your mobile application using machine learning technology

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.1K
Today, even mobile application developing company has begun to consolidate ML related to other cutting edge technologies, for example, AI and predictive analysis. This is on the grounds that ML empowers mobile applications to learn, adjust, and improve after some time.

It’s an incredible accomplishment when you consider the way that changes requested an express order from designers for gadgets to execute a particular activity. At the point when this was the standard, software engineers needed to estimate and record for each conceivable situation (and this was a fantastic test).

Be that as it may, with ML in portable applications, we have removed the speculating game from the condition. It can likewise upgrade User Experience (UX) by understanding client conduct. So you can wager that ML in versatile won’t be restricted to voice associates and chatbots.
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Total votes 16: ↑16 and ↓0 +16
Comments 0

In-App Updates Flexible Flow: Speed Up the App Update Process on Android

Reading time 7 min
Views 6.2K


With a variety of new tools and features announced at Android Dev Summit, special attention should be given to the In-App Updates (IAUs) API allowing developers to increase the speed of delivering features, bug-fixes and performance improvements to active users. Since this feature was finally released after Google I/O 2019, in this article I’ll deep dive on IAUs API, describe in details recommended user flows and provide with some code samples. Moreover, I'll share some experience of IAUs integration in the Pandao app, a marketplace platform for Chinese goods.
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Total votes 25: ↑25 and ↓0 +25
Comments 2

How Many Developers Need to Create Service Like Airbnb

Reading time 4 min
Views 3K
Back in 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia shared a room in San Francisco and were unable to pay rent on time. As a way out, they decided to turn their living space into a simple bed-and-breakfast hotel to get some money from travelers. If you love traveling i can advice you Travel news site. A year later, the venturers launched a website which evolved into the most famous peer-to-peer renting technology service called Airbnb.

 Now, the company has 3,100 employees and generates insane revenues for its founders. The statistics say that Airbnb has 150 million registered users, 3 million hosts, and 4 million listed offers. The service covers 80,000 cities in 190 countries, and, interestingly, 50% of traffic comes from mobile applications.

  These figures are so impressive that you may also want to create your own Airbnb clone and become successful. But slow down. This story is already written; do you really need to create a marketplace similar to Airbnb?
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Total votes 14: ↑13 and ↓1 +12
Comments 0

How to create a dark theme without breaking things: learning with the Yandex Mail team

Reading time 8 min
Views 8.5K


My name is Vladimir, and I develop mobile front-end for Yandex Mail. Our apps have had a dark theme for a while, but it was incomplete: only the interface and plain emails were dark. Messages with custom formatting remained light and stood out against the dark interface, hurting our users’ eyes at night.


Today I'll tell you how we fixed this problem. You will learn about two simple techniques that didn't work for us and the method that finally did the trick — adaptive page recoloring. I'll also share some ideas about adapting images to a dark theme. To be fair, darkening pages with custom CSS is a rather peculiar task, but I believe some of you may find our experience helpful.

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Total votes 22: ↑20 and ↓2 +18
Comments 1

Top mobile app development companies

Reading time 53 min
Views 8.6K
Looking for an app development company? I’ve searched for information about it and made this list. It might help to find an app development company to hire. The list contains basic information about each company included in it like company size, hourly rate, min. project size, etc. And I recently decided to upgrade the list to 100 app development companies.
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Total votes 23: ↑18 and ↓5 +13
Comments 2

Why it is imperative to Invest and Develop a branded Taxi app for your venture?

Reading time 3 min
Views 1.8K
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Today’s taxi market is crowded with ride-sharing apps like Uber, Ola, and Lyft. They are giving serious competition for upcoming ventures. These on-demand apps have initiated the radical shift in the taxi industry enabling the smooth transition from conventional taxi hailing to booking a cab through an app. Customers are opting for hailing taxis through the app because of its reliability to get a taxi and ensuring a much better cab booking experience. Thus, the taxi market is ripe for the taking, and this is the right time for entrepreneurs to make use of the opportunity.

Statistics on the Taxi Industry

The traditional taxi industry is still stuck with inefficient phone call bookings, competitors and they stand to lose at least $20 million on an everyday basis just because customers couldn’t find a cab. Another statistics survey tells us that almost 80% of the commuter prefer Ola and Uber over regular taxis and that Uber has completed nearly 2 billion rides since its inception. The profits soared over $20 Billion in the process. What made Uber and Ola successful ventures is the sound business strategy they employed. So if you are going to establish your venture then understanding the market is imperative.
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Total votes 20: ↑19 and ↓1 +18
Comments 0

Particle systems: a Christmas story

Reading time 6 min
Views 2.5K


Christmas has always been one of my favourite times of the year. For me, Christmas is a season that brings so much love, laughter, happiness, and other magical things into our lives.

I was born and raised in Spain, more specifically in Tenerife, a sunny subtropical island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean just off the African coast. I have to say that Christmas in Tenerife is very different to my the last two Christmases I’ve spent in London since joining Badoo.

One amazing plus of living in London is that I have got to see snow for the first time in my life, real snowflakes falling from the sky. Just incredible!

Talking of snowflakes, I have an interesting story to tell you about something that happened to me one day in the office the last Christmas.  It was right before I was heading home to Tenerife to spend a few days with my family.

It just so happened that last December I’d been assigned a very interesting ticket with the following description
Total votes 23: ↑22 and ↓1 +21
Comments 0

How I discovered an easter egg in Android's security and didn't land a job at Google

Reading time 11 min
Views 33K
Google loves easter eggs. It loves them so much, in fact, that you could find them in virtually every product of theirs. The tradition of Android easter eggs began in the very earliest versions of the OS (I think everyone there knows what happens when you go into the general settings and tap the version number a few times).

But sometimes you can find an easter egg in the most unlikely of places. There’s even an urban legend that one day, a programmer Googled “mutex lock”, but instead of search results landed on foo.bar, solved all tasks and landed a job at Google.

Reconstruction
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The same thing (except without the happy ending) happened to me. Hidden messages where there definitely couldn’t be any, reversing Java code and its native libraries, a secret VM, a Google interview — all of that is below.
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Total votes 20: ↑19 and ↓1 +18
Comments 0

Dependency Injection in Flutter

Reading time 4 min
Views 14K

We’re currently experimenting with Flutter while developing our side project for step challenges with colleagues. This side project should also be considered as a playground, where we can check if we can use Flutter in more serious projects. That’s why we want to use some approaches there that can look like an over-engineering for such a small project.


So one of the first questions was what can we use for dependency injection. A quick search in the internet revealed 2 libraries with positive reviews: get_it and kiwi. As get_it turned out to be a Service Locator (and I’m not a fan of this pattern), I was going to play with kiwi, which looked more promising, but then I’ve found another one library: inject.dart. It is heavily inspired by Dagger library, and as we use the latest one in our other Android projects, I’ve decided to dig into it.

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Total votes 13: ↑12 and ↓1 +11
Comments 0

Navigation in Multi-Module Projects

Reading time 10 min
Views 9.7K


Navigation in developing Android apps is quite important and you should think twice what library suits (or your own solution) most and how it will be convenient to use when the app becomes bigger. Also, it might be good to think about how easy it will be to change your implementation to another one.
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Total votes 13: ↑13 and ↓0 +13
Comments 1

Real-time Chat Solutions vs Chat Platforms — Make Your Choice

Reading time 4 min
Views 3.8K
It’s More Than You Imagine…

The possibility of acquiring more profit through a chat app solution is gaining popularity than adopting to monthly plans based chat platforms


With the rise of instant conversation among the users, it's not surprising that the global mobile messaging app is estimated to reach around 2.1 billion active users by 2020. When the communication lies as the significant action in nature, then in fact the underlying tool “messaging application” also acquires the same importance. Thus, every chat platforms like WhatsApp demand a great market value according to the features and functionalities listed. Most of the business professionals and enterprises are urged to rely on subscription-based plans to avail such messaging platform.
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Total votes 22: ↑21 and ↓1 +20
Comments 0

Implementing UI in iOS: Better, faster, and it scales

Reading time 10 min
Views 4.3K


A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces.

It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from other fields with that of an iOS developer who implements user interfaces. For example, when a designer is creating something that is big enough to be broken down into smaller parts, using a strategy like ‘Divide and Conquer’ is key to being able to focus on smaller parts that will be assembled at later stages in the process.

Breaking down a whole design into smaller subunits allows us to think about each problem in isolation, removing any dependencies between the components. But the full picture also needs to be present throughout the whole process, otherwise there can be problems when the time comes to fit everything back together.

On the other hand, while watching Abstract I noticed that in the design process for objects like a shoes, banners or buildings the final design remains fixed for the lifetime of the product. The design of a Nike shoe isn’t going to change after it is released and there aren’t going to be any updates once it’s on the shelf in the shop. Sometimes a design remains unchanged even 20 years later, and the product is still sound.
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Total votes 28: ↑27 and ↓1 +26
Comments 1

Server-provided animations in iOS apps

Reading time 5 min
Views 2.7K


Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it was decided to make some of them really lively, and by this I mean animated. And to engage people even more, we, the Badoo team, planned to update those gifts and animations every few weeks.

As an iOS engineer, you might have already guessed the challenge we faced here: the need to add new animations and remove the old ones was going to require a fair amount of work from the client side. We’d need both the Android and the iOS development teams for every release — which, when combined with the amount of time App Store reviews and approval often take, would mean it might be days before each update could go live. But we solved the problem, and I’m going to explain to you how.

Solution overview


By this stage, we already knew how to export Adobe After Effects (AAE) animations into the format readable by our iOS app using the Lottie library. This time though, we went a bit further: we decided to create a kind of animation storage service, available via the internet. In other words, we would store all the actual animations on the server and deliver them to the client apps on demand:
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Total votes 33: ↑32 and ↓1 +31
Comments 1
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