Trendy Mobile App Features You Should Consider To Implement
Is your mobile app missing these game-changing features?
Good morning, fellow developers! In today’s crowded app market, choosing the right features is key to making an app stand out. Bhumi Goklani’s recent article hits the nail on the head: while design is essential, it’s features like secure login and powerful search that keep users engaged. Starting with these core functionalities can make a big difference in user retention.
Beyond the basics, advanced features like AI-powered chatbots and augmented reality can take user experience up a notch. Think about an e-commerce app where users can virtually try on products or get instant support from a chatbot. These innovative elements not only engage users but also give your app a unique edge in the market.
Finally, monetization features, like in-app purchases or subscription models, can turn engagement into revenue. LinkedIn, for example, has nailed this with premium tools that users find worth paying for. As you plan your app, consider which features will not only bring users back but also drive growth—because the right mix of features can turn a good app into a great one.
Check out the full post here.
Enhancements to the App Store featuring process
Apple has rolled out new tools for App Store featuring, making it easier for developers to showcase app updates and major releases. With the new Featuring Nominations in App Store Connect, you can now submit details about new launches, content, or features directly for consideration in the Today tab.
If your app gets featured, you’ll be notified, and you can even generate ready-made Apple-designed marketing assets to promote on social media. This streamlined approach could help boost visibility, giving your app’s big moments the spotlight they deserve.
The magic of small engineering teams
James Temperton’s insights on PostHog’s small-team model reveal how startups can keep scaling without losing speed. At PostHog, teams are kept intentionally small—think “one-pizza teams”—and are organized around specific products or functions. Each team operates like a mini-startup, with autonomy over roadmaps, features, and bug fixes, while only needing a single lead for direction.
This setup fuels rapid shipping and decision-making, though it comes with trade-offs like occasional ownership overlap and prioritizing speed over seamlessness. It’s a fascinating look at how PostHog balances growth and agility through their engineering-led, small-team structure.
Understanding actors in Swift
Natascha Fadeeva breaks down Swift’s actor model, showing how it tackles concurrency by isolating mutable state and preventing data races. With actors, only one task at a time can modify data, and any access from outside requires async and await, making concurrency safer and more manageable.
Natascha also highlights how Swift’s Sendable protocol enforces thread safety for data passed in and out of actors, ensuring that shared data remains reliable. This actor model is a powerful tool for developers looking to write secure and efficient concurrent code in Swift.
Why is xcodebuild slower than the Xcode GUI?
Thomas Ricouard dives into why the xcodebuild command-line tool is slower than the Xcode GUI, noting both a persistent bug and design choices behind the difference. Unlike the GUI, which maintains a "warm" build service for faster incremental builds, `xcodebuild` shuts down the server after each use, leading to longer times.
Thomas points out that xcodebuild also conducts network checks for provisioning profiles, even for incremental builds, which can be avoided by blocking certain Apple domains temporarily during the build. Until Apple addresses these issues, the workaround provides a bit of relief for developers facing sluggish build times.
Introduction to ViewModel
Nathan Kayumba dives into the ViewModel’s role in Android architecture, stressing its importance as a bridge between the data and view layers. ViewModel ensures that data is preserved across screen rotations and keeps the UI responsive without cluttering it with data-handling code. In a well-architected MVVM setup, the View only talks to the ViewModel, which then manages state and handles user events like data refreshes. By keeping UI elements out of the ViewModel and using LiveData or StateFlow, developers can maintain a clean separation of concerns, making apps more efficient and easier to maintain.
Widget Refactoring in Flutter: Helper Methods vs Separate Widgets
Wafa Mohamed delves into the benefits of breaking down large build methods in Flutter by comparing helper methods and separate widgets. While helper methods may be faster to implement, refactoring into separate widgets can lead to big gains in performance, testability, and maintenance. Separate widgets allow Flutter to rebuild only the parts that change, rather than the entire UI, which is particularly useful in stateful elements or animations.
What is a Crash?
Crashes. We all dread them, but do we really understand them? Jacob’s latest deep dive sheds light on what a crash actually is – more than just an app failure. Think of a crash not as an accident but as a controlled shutdown, one the system triggers to avoid something much worse. Imagine a 9-level hierarchy of user issues, with crashes sitting only at Level 6. They’re far from the worst outcome; data corruption or a full system compromise lies further down the danger line. When your app crashes, iOS is making a calculated decision to protect users from even bigger risks.
Behind every crash, there’s an intricate dance between the Swift Runtime and the XNU Kernel. The Swift Runtime keeps your app safe from memory mishaps, like accessing deallocated memory, while the XNU Kernel steps in at a more fundamental level, guarding against rogue memory access that could endanger the device itself. Jacob takes us through the code to show exactly where these systems decide to pull the plug. Both the Swift Runtime and the kernel are open source, so you can dig into the actual Swift and XNU code – a goldmine if you want to understand what goes wrong and why.
🚀 Launch of Week
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🧰 Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
Tart - Tart is a virtualization toolset to build, run and manage macOS and Linux virtual machines (VMs) on Apple Silicon.
Haze - Haze is a library which aims to provide a way to achieve background blurring on Jetpack Compose and Compose Multiplatform.
Valkyrie - Intellij IDEA / Android Studio plugin to generate Compose ImageVector from SVG/XML
🤝 Career Opportunities
Software Engineer at Chai - Flutter
Senior Android Engineer at Distilled - Android
Staff Android Software Engineer (Native SDKs) at bitdrift - Android
🗓️ Upcoming Events
Firebase Demo Day - Nov 19 2024, Online
RobotoConf - Nov 28 2024, Verona, Italy
Artic Conference iOS - Mar 11-13 2025, Oulu, Finland
Deep Dish Swift - Apr 27-29 2025, Chicago, US
✌️Finally…
That’s a wrap for this edition! I hope the insights were helpful and the updates gave you some new ideas to chew on. Stay tuned for next week’s issue, and remember, if you have any thoughts or questions, my inbox is always open! Until then, take care, keep coding, and may your bugs be few, your coffee be bottomless, and your syntax flawless—because as we all know, perfect code is just one caffeine jolt away! ☕⚡
Thanks for sticking with us to the end! Now it’s your turn, hit reply or jump into the comments and share your thoughts on this edition! 🔥