Posts we liked

It’s official, Swift 6 is here

The last major version update to Swift was five years ago, but we can now reset the calendar because Swift 6 has arrived. Holly Borla, an engineering manager on Apple's Swift language team, walks through everything new in 6: from the Swift testing library, to expanded C++ interoperability and Linux support, to the @DebugDescription macro, and everything in between.

Compose Multiplatform and the native app future

Is good enough actually good enough? That’s the question mobile developers ask themselves when they’re faced with the choice of building a cross-platform app instead of two fully native ones, weighing the pros of not having to build and maintain separate apps and codebases with the cons of increased risk of performance issues and UX flakiness. Kevin Galligan looks at how Compose can be blended with native iOS UI and considers whether good enough will soon be best… enough.

The memory leak: an Xcode detective story

Jacob Bartlett of Emerge Tools has an app, and users of that app were reporting a strange bug. As described by Jacob, “Sometimes, when tapping a push notification, some users saw the destination screen appearing twice - the app would open, navigate to the correct screen, but the push transition would happen twice.” Read in detail just how far down the rabbit hole Jacob had to fall to find the cause and fix it.

Kotlin KSP —Leveraging code generation for a real-world problem

Kotlin Symbol Processing (aka KSP) is an API that allows anyone to develop lightweight compiler plugins. Theoretically, this should empower you to use it to easily generate new code for a project. In practice, most guides to using KSP are simple tutorials that don’t show how to do anything meaningful with it, implying that it isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's why Serhii Hryshyn set out to demonstrate how to truly leverage KSP in the real world.

Posts we wrote

Is there such a thing as releasing mobile updates too fast and too often?

It’s considered best practice to release new versions of an app very frequently to squash bugs, add new features, and act on user feedback. While it’s true that users generally prefer apps that have been recently updated, there are situations where users may begin to find these updates annoying, sometimes even to the point that they stop downloading your app at all. Pol Piella considers why.  

Mobile teams are second class citizens, but not on purpose

Mobile teams are still catching up with their web colleagues. Not in terms of skill or contributions to their orgs, but in their access to tooling and infrastructure to support their feature and release work. Why is this the case? How can mobile teams ensure they’re operating on equal footing with their web counterparts?

What is mobile release management?

Life is pretty easy for SaaS web developers. All they have to do is write code and merge it whenever they feel like it. Voila! The newest update is up and available for everyone without delay. We all know that does not happen with a mobile release. There are big speed bumps from the moment you begin planning an upcoming release all the way until you've 100% rolled out to the stores. How do you navigate these speed bumps? With mobile release management. As you can probably tell, this is not a “post we wrote” but a “video we made.” Watch it below.

Runway featured feature

Running and managing rollouts is a critical part of the mobile release cycle. That's why we recently added a couple of new features to Runway’s Rollouts dashboard.

First, we added checklist items functionality to the Rollout page so you can assign and track any post-release tasks the team needs to perform. Like checklist items elsewhere within Runway, you can set up automatic reminders, assign individuals or groups, and extend their functionality via our API and webhooks.

Events

We just completed a whirlwind tour of events over the past week in Spain (NSSpain), NYC (droidcon), and Paris (Swift Connection). Though October will not see a single week that is quite so action-packed, we will be at two events this coming month:
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• SwiftLeeds in Leeds, UK on Oct 8th and 9th.
• droidcon London (in London if you were wondering) on Oct 31st and Nov 1st.

We’re feeling quite chuffed about these two upcoming events, which we expect will be ace. You all still say chuffed and ace in the UK, right?
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