Mobile Dev Weekly Issue 383: December 24, 2021

#383 — December 24, 2021

Hello! 👋

First up, some news: not only is this the last issue of the year, it's also the last issue of Mobile Dev Weekly. We're bringing things to a close after almost eight years of delivering you this email digest. We hope it's proven valuble as we've navigated through the rapidly evolving mobile development space.

We'd like to use this final issue as opportunity to extend a thank you to all of you for reading, and to our scrupulous curators Holly Schinsky and Brian Rinaldi.

For this last issue we're bringing you some of the most clicked stories from this year, along with commentary from both Holly and Brian on their thoughts on the mobile development landscape as we bring this newsletter to a close.

Thank you.
— The Mobile Dev Weekly team.

✨ Highlights from 2021:

The State Of Mobile First and Desktop First — Is mobile first or desktop first still relevant today? This article from August dived into that rather enduring question, outlining the pros and cons of such approaches.

Ahmad Shadeed

Google Flutter Now Rivals Facebook's React Native in Dev Use — The past few years of Mobile Dev Weekly have outlined the rise and rise of Flutter, and it's now so hot that it's “approaching React Native as the leading cross-platform mobile framework for developers”.

Lawrence E Hecht

A Bashful Button Worth $8 Million — The old 100vh bug seems to be mostly solved now, however, this post from the summer highlights a then real-world example of how such an error could prove rather costly. A cautionary tale for any similar bugs, and a good reminder to carry out extensive user testing.

Jason Grigsby

How To Solve Any iOS Crash Ever — It looks like many of you have come up against a crash in which you had absolutely no idea what was going on, and no amount of testing allowed you to reproduce the issue. It would seem so at least, as this post proved highly popular.

Bruno Rocha

Web Apps vs. Native Apps: The Growth of Progressive Web Apps — Feature parity with native apps is the ultimate goal of PWAs, and this post from October highlights just how close some PWAs are to native apps (albeit not on iOS).

Richard MacManus

A Decade and A Half of Instability: The History of Google Messaging Apps — Curious just how many Google messaging apps we've seen come and go during the time this newsletter has been running? Well, it’s worth clicking through to see years of messy Google messaging clients all laid out.

Ron Amadeo

Chrome Is The New Safari. And So Are Edge and Firefox — The browser landscape (or lack of it) on iOS has been a sticking point over the years, as this post from early September underscores.

Niels Leenheer

Which Mobile Development Framework Is Right For You? — Knowing what tools to turn to is always sought-after advice. This post looks at what to consider when choosing your next mobile development framework (such as Ionic, Xamarin, NativeScript, etc).

Sophia Martin

📝 From the Editors:

I've always been particularly fascinated with mobile development and even more so with the idea of cross-platform options that offered me a low barrier to entry and allowed me to build apps without a steep learning curve. I loved that I could use my existing skill set and have an app up and running on an iPhone or Android device in no time. I started with Adobe AIR for mobile and transitioned to PhoneGap soon after and loved every part of my time with mobile, whether it was in blogging, teaching workshops, or contributing content to this newsletter.

Throughout these years, I also spent time with several cool frameworks which made mobile development that much more fun; Kendo UI, Ionic, Framework7, Onsen UI, Flutter to name a few, and met so many great people as a result. It is one of the best communities I've had the pleasure of working with, and while I'm sad to see the end of this newsletter, I look forward to seeing how the mobile space continues to evolve into the future.

— Holly Schinsky

As many of you know, Mobile Dev Weekly actually began its existence as Mobile Web Weekly. Eight years ago, it wasn't at all clear that the web would be a dominant platform on mobile.I originally proposed the newsletter idea as a way to help raise the voice of the community building for mobile using web technologies.

While a lot has changed, and the web has solidified its place on mobile, we still see this issue playing out, for instance, in the fight over the lack of support for certain features in iOS Safari and the general lack of browser engine competition on iOS.

Mobile as a very broad platform, both native and web, is more critical than ever. I look forward to seeing how you all, the mobile developer community, continue to push the platform forward.

(For more thoughts on the end of MDW, see my post here).

— Brian Rinaldi