Volley is a useful library and can save the day for any developer. It can handle multiple request types, such as JSON, images and text, and it performs better than AsyncTask. Volley is an integral part of Chetan’s toolkit, and it’s a huge win for any development team in any project. Let’s review what Volley is and get to know its benefits. In this article, Chetan Giridhar would like to take you through his experience of using networking libraries in Android, focusing on APIs.
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The mobile developer population has boomed, and the number of mobile apps in the market has hit new heights. Most studies show that in-app advertising is set to be a key driver of mobile growth over the coming years. In this article, Stacy Golmack will shed some light on the questions like: Is the average revenue truly growing? What are the most popular monetization models in the market today? Which ones will be driving growth tomorrow? Which models have outlived their time? She’ll try to present comprehensive answers, backed by statistical reports and expert opinion.
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While the concept of mobile-first began as a philosophy to help prioritize content and ensure positive, device-agnostic experiences, budgetary and scheduling constraints often result in mobile-first meaning mobile-only. According to the analytics data of Marli and Jasons’s healthcare clients, the majority of their users are still on desktop. They want to provide a positive experience for those users and for users on mobile and tablet apps and for those using mobile browsers — and even for users having an in-person experience! It is not accurate to assume that mobile is the primary experience.
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Have you tried experimenting with the Complications API? Thanks to the Complications API, every Android application can easily export the most important data and make it accessible at a glance directly on the user’s wrist, even without requiring a dedicated watch face. In this article, Daniele Bonaldo shows how to make your app’s data available directly from a wearable watch face, allowing the user to access it at a glance. You’ll also learn how to sync data between a phone and smartwatch, and how to display it using the new Complications API.
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Back in 2007, the world met the iPhone for the very first time. After Apple’s product debut, it took less than six months for work to begin on PhoneGap, which would become one of the first and most adopted frameworks for hybrid mobile app development — that is, for apps written simultaneously for multiple platforms using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than coded in native languages.
When compared with the prospect of learning an entirely new language and development environment in order to program iOS (and soon Android) apps, the appeal of this type of development to the already huge population of web developers in the world was palpable.
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If there is one thing that will stand the test of time, it’s thumb placement on mobile devices. This makes consideration of the “thumb zone”, a term coined in Steven Hoober’s research, an important factor in the design and development of mobile interfaces. In this article, Samantha Ingram will share the knowledge she’s acquired about the thumb zone and how to apply its rules to navigation, cards and swipe gestures.
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Getting an app just right, getting it to work across all possible devices, with different OS versions, display resolutions, chipsets and other hardware characteristics, and making the user experience smooth across all possible configurations, is a challenging task. In this article, Ville-Veikko Helppi will look at what’s available for testing React Native apps. He’ll explain some key features of React Native, before looking at how to implement these tests, and then he will categorize testing methods and frameworks on three levels, providing examples for each.
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Nic Raboy is an application developer that has been developing mobile applications as a hobby for the past five years. In this article, Nic is going to tell his story about mobile application development. He will look at some of the common problems with developing mobile applications, both native and hybrid, and how NativeScript by Telerik fills the gap. He’ll proceed to develop a NativeScript Android and iOS application from scratch, and then convert the same application to use the bleeding-edge Angular 2 JavaScript framework.
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Imagine how great it would be to write your tests only once and run them on different platforms. Writing tests to guarantee bug-free software is not straightforward. However, the underlying technology to build a testing infrastructure should not be an impediment. Appium is a solution that protects you from the heterogeneity of mobile platforms and helps you focus on writing functional tests that can be run independent of platform. In this article, Antonio J. Roa-Valverde will show you how to build your own test automation environment for Android by relying on Appium. Hopefully, this guide will lower the barrier for you to build your own mobile test automation solution.
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How do you maintain that momentum and ensure that your app keeps gaining in popularity? In this article, Ryan Bateman covers some practical approaches to keeping users interested in and using your app, including talking to your users, keep on launching features, making the first impression count and using all functionalities of the operating system. The following tips are all long-term approaches to maximizing user retention, driving daily usage and getting users hooked on your app, but they don’t have to be deployed simultaneously. Your general aim, and best approach, should simply be to demonstrate that you know and care about your users’ needs and requests.
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