Mobile

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.

Java has some idiosyncrasies of its own and design choices that can make it rather verbose. While Java is a mature and performant programming language, developers frequently need to write boilerplate code that bring little or no real value other than complying with some set of constraints and conventions. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Miguel García López shows how Project Lombok can help dramatically reduce the amount of boilerplate code that needs to be written in a Java application.

Android provides many ways of creating and managing threads, and third-party libraries exist to make that even easier. However, with so many options, choosing the right approach can be quite confusing. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Eliran Goshen discusses some common scenarios in Android development that involve threading and how each of the scenarios can be dealt with.

Developing a mobile app for multiple platforms can be quite costly. Implementing the same functionalities in multiple programming languages and dealing with a plethora of unique libraries for each platform requires a massive amount of time and knowledge. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Sylvain Gravel talks about Xamarin and its companion technologies that let you build mobile applications for multiple platforms without compromising familiarity, performance, and uniqueness.

Dealing with concurrency in Android through imperative-style programming can be quite the hassle. RxJava, a library for reactive and functional style programming, allows concurrency constructs to be modeled in a reactive way in Android's non-reactive world. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Christopher Arriola shows us how RxJava can be incrementally introduced to existing Android projects and leveraged to simplify concurrency.

Modern mobile application development requires a well thought-out plan for keeping user data in sync across various devices. This is a thorny problem with many gotchas and pitfalls, but users expect the feature and expect it to work well. For iOS and macOS, Apple provides a robust toolkit, called CloudKit API, which allows developers targeting Apple platforms to solve this synchronization problem. In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Paul Young demonstrate how to use CloudKit to keep a user’s data in sync between multiple clients.

In this tutorial, you will learn how automated testing works for the iOS platform and how to implement it in your project.

The Ionic project is rapidly gaining in popularity and is one of the most popular open source projects worldwide. With the recent announcement of the stable version of Ionic 2, this is the perfect time to underscore the Ionic 2 and its predecessor. In this post, Toptal software engineer Julien Renaux outlines the major changes Ionic 2 brought to the platform and explains how to put these new features to good use.