Mobile

Cross-platform mobile apps are increasingly being built with React Native. But how can you scan for QR codes and augment the user's camera view when they're present?

Google’s Flutter mobile SDK only recently made it to version 1.0, but it is already catching up with React Native in terms of market share. Flutter is also used to develop apps for Google’s upcoming Fuchsia OS. In this article, Toptal Java Developer Nemanja Stosic demonstrates how to create a simple messaging app using Flutter and Firebase.

A monorepository is a code management and architectural concept whereby you keep all your isolated bits of code in one super repository instead of managing multiple smaller repositories—like a single repository for your website and mobile apps. In this article, Toptal Freelance Front-end Developer Alexander Noel attempts to gather and explain as much information as possible about how and when to use monorepos.

Keeping your Android codebase maintainable as your codebase grows can be a challenge. In this article, Toptal Freelance Android Developer Abhishek Tyagi shows how to combine MVVM with Clean Architecture—the latter as described by Robert C. Martin—to write decoupled, testable, and maintainable code.

iOS developers love the power of UIKit, and animating a UIView is usually fairly easy. However, if you want to chain animations together and set up dependencies between them, your code can quickly become difficult to read with many nested closures and indentation levels. In this article, I’ll explore how to apply the power of a reactive framework such as RxSwift to make that code look much cleaner as well as easier to read and follow. My client wanted a story told through a sequence of animations rather than by playing a pre-rendered video, and with RxSwift, we easily tweaked it to perfection.

Code reuse turns lazy developers into efficient geniuses. Imagine if you could write the majority of your code once and run it on the web and native mobile—both iOS and Android. In this article, Toptal Freelance Dart Developer Marko Perutović introduces us to the BLoC pattern, whereby you can isolate your business logic in pure Dart and reuse it in both Flutter and AngularDart.

Real-time data-driven apps create new challenges in the way we structure our programs, especially on mobile. In this article, Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Lucas van Dongen implements an iOS chat app, comparing the classic MVC approach with a static immutable MVVM pattern.

Traditionally, connecting devices for peer-to-peer communications has been a tedious task: An application needs to discover what’s around it, open connections on both sides, and then maintain them as network infrastructure, connections, distances, etc. Realizing the difficulties inherent in these activities, in iOS 7 and macOS 10.10 Apple introduced its MultipeerConnectivity framework. Join Toptal Freelance iOS Developer Ben Gottlieb as he explains what MultipeerConnectivity is, and teaches us how to use it.