Shaun Lewis - Lewis, S: Native Mobile Development

• 2019-11-12: First Release

This book is a practical cross-reference for iOS and Android native development. By native we mean the original, provided toolsets for each platformSwift and Cocoa for iOS, and Java or Kotlin with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) software development kit (SDK) for Android.

We were motivated to write this book out of common need. Both authors have experience with both platforms but specialize in one. Members of our team (including ourselves) would find themselves working on a problem we encountered in one platform, determine a solution to that problem in that platform, and then need to share that solution with the team members working on the other platform.

Often, these were common tasks like reading or writing to or from a database or files, making a network connection, or showing user feedback in a way thats familiar to users. When we started codifying and documenting these tasks, in both platforms, it quickly became apparent that a very large majority of application code fell into one of these categorizations and that a reference source for all of them could be valuable to teams with a similar makeup, teams starting a transition to another platform, or even developers who wanted to start learning both platforms at the same time.

We hope that this book will provide that resource for the most common mobile development tasks to its readers.

Having an entire team of mobile developers with varying levels of cross-platform experience, we were able to manage this pretty well, but the idea of a cross-reference came up a lot, yet theres really nothing currently available that provides the breadth we think is necessary. We could only imagine the frustration a sole developer in the same situation might experience; this book allows anyone to learn the basic approach to most of the common tasks in application development for both platforms. Each task chapter shows the entire process for the task in both Android and iOS with human-readable walk-throughs of the code samples. We would posit that the samples cover 80% of the basic knowledge required to start off in app development; of course the reader is expected to maintain and update their knowledge and read documentation for what we dont specifically cover, but weve included a start-to-finish application walk-through as well. This sample app demonstrates how to successfully accomplish virtually everything needed by a modern app, using the task cross-reference provided earlier.

Since all Android code examples are provided in both Java and Kotlin, this book has a pleasant side effect of allowing Android developers the same type of cross-reference between Java and Kotlin as cross-platform developers enjoy between iOS and AOSP.

The code samples are not pseudo-code; they are written in the suggested languages and should all compile and function as described.