#287 — December 20, 2019

Read on the Web

Mobile Developer Weekly

📱 We're ending the year with a look back at some of the biggest stories, best tutorials and favored resources of the past twelve months. This special issue (cheesy stock photo included) brings together the most clicked links from throughout 2019 — PWAs & Flutter seemed to dominate the conversation this year.

Thank you for supporting and reading the newsletter throughout the year. We'll be back in early January!

— The Mobile Developer Weekly team

A CSS Only Solution To :hover On Touchscreens — This tip on how to best handle hover states on mobile devices proved very popular. The TL;DR here? Using @media(hover: hover) and (pointer: fine).

Mezo Istvan

Will PWAs Replace Native Mobile Apps? — This article is actually from late 2018, but we shared it back in January of this year and it got plenty of attention. It's fair to say PWAs really started gaining steam in 2019, and this article provided a measured look at the reality of their increased adoption and what it means for native apps.

Suzanne Scacca

Slow iOS Builds Weighing You Down? — Semaphore is now the fastest way to test and deploy iOS apps. Powerful CI/CD pipelines run 42% faster compared to Travis, and they auto-scale to every git push. Sign up free with GitHub to try it today.

Semaphore 2.0 sponsor

Why I Think Flutter is the Future of Mobile App Development — In this article from May, a developer shared reasons why he feels that Flutter appears to be a promising step forward for mobile app developers.

Eric Grandt

Why Progressive Web Apps Are The Future of Mobile Web — A popular, detailed overview of what makes up a PWA, their benefits, and why you should be looking at them. Links out to plenty of handy resources too.

Jason Rzutkiewicz and Jeremy Lockhorn

The Landscape of Cross-Platform App Development — Chris Coyier takes a stab at making sense of the fast evolving cross-platform mobile framework landscape.

CSS Tricks

The Term "Responsive Web Design" Has Failed — This opinion piece got plenty of you clicking. It argues that responsive web design “has always focussed so heavily on the visual, dimensional, aspects of digital design” and that “it’s failed to capture the true otherness of being on a small screen”.

Frances Berriman

Deploy Enterprise-Grade iOS/Swift/Android/React Chat In Days... — Stream makes it easy with SDKs and Chat React UI Components. Stream powers Feeds and Chat for over 500 million end-users.

Stream sponsor

5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe — Scott Jehl shared thoughts on how 5G probably won’t solve the mobile web’s performance problems due to sending too much expensive JavaScript for end users to process.

Filament Group

The (Not So) Hidden Cost of Sharing Code Between iOS And Android — A look at how Dropbox used to share C++ code between their iOS and Android apps but the overhead of doing so turned out to be more costly than just writing two versions.

Eyal Guthmann (Dropbox)

13 Reasons Why You Should Choose/Consider A Move to Flutter in 2019 — This article from January ran through why you may want to choose Google’s Flutter as your dev environment. Did you?

Ganesh .S.P

iPhone 11, iPadOS and iOS 13 for PWAs & Web Development — This deep dive highlighted the changes and issues to be aware of for PWA support in both iOS 13 and iPadOS.

Maximiliano Firtman

Google Play Store Now Open for Progressive Web Apps — When Chrome 72 for Android shipped in January, it brought with it the ability to distribute PWAs in the Google Play Store.

Maximiliano Firtman

Fuchsia.dev: Google Launches Official Site About Fuchsia OS — Google launched the Fuchsia.dev site back in June - it's an official collection of developer resources and info about their in-development hybrid Zircon-based Fuchsia OS.

Kyle Bradshaw

Android Vs iOS Global Market Share in 2019 — An overview of the market in which you're trying to reach is always knowledge worth having.

James Kielty