Mobile App Posts

Following some basic mobile app design best practices and avoiding the most common mistakes will help designers create apps that live past the crucial 90-day mark when 71% are abandoned.

Emojis are universal symbols of expression, transcending cultural and linguistic divides. As technology continues to advance, designers will be the ones to define the next evolution of human communication.

Writing reusable code that can be shared across multiple platforms can make developing mobile applications a lot easier. But, how do you do that without paying the usual cost of maintainability, ease of testing, and poor user experience that comes with cross-platform mobile application development?

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Emran Bajrami walks us through Xamarin and shows us techniques for building high-quality cross-platform apps.

Interfaces that have animations and transitions provide a better UX for app users, and stimulate user engagement. It’s becoming increasingly important to understand how to add motion to your designs, which is why we wrote today’s tutorial.

In it, Toptal Design Editor Tidjane Tall demonstrates how to craft effective UI animation techniques, using Principle for Mac, in a series of short videos.

Check out a collection of mobile eCommerce inspirations created by different designers from around the world. Toptal Designer Cai Cardenas curated a selection of designs that each delights their users.

Some of the screens are captured from live products, some are still in development, and some are purely concepts designed to push the bounds of what is even considered possible.

Check out a collection of onboarding design inspirations created by different designers from around the world. Toptal Design Blog Lead Editor Michael Abehsera curated a selection of designs that each finds creative ways to retain users.

Some of the designs are captured from live products, some are still in development, and some are purely concepts designed to push the bounds of what is even considered possible.

Check out a curated collection of beautiful and futuristic travel UIs created by different designers from around the world.

Some of the designs are captured from live products, some are still in development, and some are purely concepts designed to push the bounds of what is even considered possible.

The plethora of tutorials on building Android apps may have you thinking that making a mobile app is simple. In reality, however, performance issues can be very complicated, and because performance plays a key role in making sure that your app stays on your users’ list of favorite apps for a long time, every little detail must be given one’s full attention.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Tibor Kaputa shares some tips on how you can optimize some common performance issues and identify some of the bottlenecks in your Android app.

Truly understanding design is easier said than done. Coding and aesthetic design require very different skill sets, which is why some front-end developers aren’t as proficient in design as they could be, and the quality of their work suffers for it.

In this post, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Bryan Grezeszak explains why good front-end developers have to follow essential design principles down to the pixel, and should regularly seek out advice and feedback from their designers.

Navigation in mobile applications, when done right, can have tremendous positive impact on overall user experience. Android offers application developers multiple ways of implementing navigation in their application. However, not all navigation patterns are created equal.

In this article, Toptal engineer Becze Szabolcs shows us how to implement fragment-based navigation and how it stacks up against Android’s traditional navigation philosophy.

Sketch promises a faster workflow and greater ease-of-use than its counterparts. You can think of Sketch as Illustrator with some Photoshop stitched together, but that’s only part of the story. Many Adobe features that you don’t use 90 percent of the time have been stripped out, giving us a streamlined tool that is designed to quickly prototype everything from simple wireframes to complex mockups.

In this article, Toptal freelance designer Alex Gurevich takes a closer look at the Sketch vs. Photoshop dilemma, explaining which has the advantage from a variety of perspectives.

2016 design trends are an evolution and extension of existing design languages and patterns. We are not reinventing the wheel this year, so this leaves room for innovative designs based on familiar building blocks. However, while the underlying basics remain unchanged, designers will have to master new skills and employ new tools to keep up.

In this post, Toptal Lead Designer Lubos Volkov lists a number of design trends that are likely to mark 2016. These industry trends are not limited to visual appearance or the advent of new tools. Some of them could potentially redefine our understanding of what it means to be a designer.

Are we really going to need $500 phones to get people in developing countries on 3G or 4G? Not really.

Welcome to the world of commoditised smartphones. Allow us to explain what’s going on and why it could have a significant impact on software and hardware industries.