Mobile Dev Weekly Issue 368: August 13, 2021

#368 — August 13, 2021

Last week Apple announced plans for new child safety features in iOS. These upcoming changes include safety tools in Messages, new Siri and Search information, and CSAM detection. The latter is a new content-scanning technology on US iCloud uploads — Apple has shared a technical summary on how this will work here.

This planned detection technology, albeit well intentioned, has proved somewhat controversial however, with many seeing it as a potential backdoor of sorts to device surveillance. So widespread was the concern around this feature that Apple published a follow-up FAQ late Sunday. An open-letter calling on the company to halt its plans has gained nearly 8,000 signatures at time of writing.

There's plenty of nuance and details to consider here — I found the latest episode of the Upgrade podcast to do a good job in covering this topic in-depth, and John Gruber's write-up is also worth a read.

— Chris Brandrick

Brian Rinaldi recommends

Android 12 Beta 4 'Promotes Order Over Chaos' — The latest beta of Android 12 is available and you’ll definitely want to test against its revamped approach to privacy and security.

Richard Lawler

Chris Brandrick recommends

📄 PDF: Mobile Overview Report — This detailed document looks at the global picture for what are the most popular mobile devices and operating systems in use. Plenty of handy data to have on hand if you’re doing a lot of device testing!

Scientia Mobile

Everything You Need to Build Video for Mobile — Easily build video or live streaming with Mux's API and developer-friendly docs. POST a video; GET back a video URL that plays well on any device.

Mux sponsor

Brian Rinaldi recommends

Handling Mounting And Unmounting Of Navigation Routes In React Native — A look at how to mount and unmount navigation stacks based on conditions in React Native.

Daniel Don

Peter Cooper recommends

The New Async Await Concurrency Approach in Swift — A guide to fully understand the new concurrency system in Swift. Though it’s only available from Swift 5.5 and iOS 15 onwards.

Bruno Lorenzo

Brian Rinaldi recommends

How to Implement iOS-Specific Components and APIs — A look at using some APIs that are specific to iOS, so can’t be cross-platform, within a React Native application.

Salah Elhossiny

⚡️ Quick Bits

Here's a collection of podcasts worth checking out if you're a Flutter dev.
The FCC have debuted an updated mobile broadband map of the U.S.
The Carrot weather app is known for its sass, this interview with its developer touches on how it came to be, and what plans are in the pipeline.
Yelp recently refreshed their app icon and logo, and here's the inside story behind the change.

Chris Brandrick recommends

What's New in Xcode 13 Beta 5

Federico Zanetello

Peter Cooper recommends

Ionic vs React Native: Which Cross-Platform Framework is Best for You?

Abhishek Kothari

Holly Schinsky recommends

How to Best Utilize typedef in Dart for Your Flutter Apps

Shaiq khan

Holly Schinsky recommends

Explore Open URLs In Flutter — How to use the url_launcher plugin to open URLs in your Flutter apps.

Shaiq khan

Peter Cooper recommends

View Source: A Way to View a Page's Source If You Otherwise Can't — Given a URL, this page lets you look at the HTML returned. Handy on mobile or kiosk devices, perhaps, where the natural ‘view source’ functionality isn’t available.

Neatnik