Welcome to JWay Tech Talks where we talk about everything from tech news and trends to anything people in tech companies should be learning about featuring insightful guests from a wide variety of professions and backgrounds to share stories of great successes, including the hard lessons they learned along the way.
Euluvye: Hello, everyone and welcome to JWay Tech Talk. I am Euluvye Pollack, your host for this exciting third episode. Thank you for joining us today as we embark on a journey of exploration and discovery. In this episode, we’ll be diving deep into modern ways of building and running mobile applications. Let us hear fascinating insights from our incredible guest, JWay’s mobile application manager, Paul Sevilla. Hi Paul. So, how are you doing today?
Paul: Hello, I’m doing great. Busy, but I can manage.
Euluvye: Can you discuss the importance of user experience design in mobile applications and provide examples of patterns or practices commonly employed in modern app development?
Paul: Sure. I think it is important that your mobile app needs an effective UX design because it determines how happily your users can interact with it when they try your app for the first time, they must decide whether they want to stay with your app. A bad UX design can turn off users before they ever get to see the great features of your app. Some great examples of UX patterns are one-handed usage where, where it takes or makes your app easier to use on both larger and regular devices where you only have one hand available.
An example of this is the Apple Music app. Also, we have these skeleton views. It uses a visual placeholder that appears before the page content renders completely. So with this, it makes your app feel faster, and almost every app does this nowadays, you can see this on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and so on.
Euluvye: What are some advantages of using a cross-platform framework like React Native or Flutter for mobile app development compared to traditional native development?
Paul: The biggest advantage of using a cross-platform framework like React Native or Flutter is that developers don’t need to create separate codes for different platforms like Android and iOS as the codebase can be reused between the two platforms which helps increase development speed and efficiency considerably. As a result, you get faster time-to-market and lesser maintenance efforts. Also, React Native and Flutter have the live reload or hot reload feature. This feature allows developers to see and work with changes in real-time. This means that you can make fixes in the code while the app is loading and it will be reflected in the app automatically, thus improving your productivity.
If you may be wondering how they compare when it comes to performance, and look and feel— both cross-platform frameworks (React Native and Flutter) are almost native-like as the user-experience and user-interface look almost identical. React Native components map 1:1 with native development components, while Flutter uses widgets that have a natural look, are extensible, and fast.
Paul: If you may be wondering how they compare when it comes to performance. and the look and feel of both React native and Flutter are almost native like the user experience and the user interface look almost identical. Also, React-native components, and map 1 to 1 with native development components. While flutter uses wits that have a natural look and are extensible and fast.
Euluvye: Then what are some strategies for achieving seamless integration between mobile applications and third-party APIs or services?
Paul: Good question. In mobile apps development, we developers rely on third-party APIs and services to quickly build an app without having to develop everything from scratch. To achieve seamless integration between the apps that we build, we make use of dependency management tools like npm or yarn for React Native, pubspec.yaml for managing dart packages in Flutter, cocoapods, carthage, swift package manager for iOS, gradle for Android. These tools are easy to set-up and use, and they reduce the maintenance work and possibilities of central points of failure.
Euluvye: In your opinion, how can you, how can the use of analytics and data-driven insights, improve the performance and user engagement of mobile applications?
Paul: Analytics data is instrumental in making your app more profitable and discoverable. Mobile app analytics can provide insights into user engagement and retention ratio. As we all know— more engagement acquires more clients. App analytics closes the gap between maintenance and attrition by allowing an app to exclusively concentrate on promising users and revenue streams. App analytics also offer detailed and customized learning, and hence help engage new users. With the insights gathered from app analytics, product owners can customize the app to provide a seamless experience to their end users.
Euluvye: Can you discuss the emerging trends or technologies in mobile app development that have gained prominence in 2023?
Paul: In 2023 we are seeing more and more advances in AI especially in the mobile industry.
You may be familiar with Siri Cortana, Alexa, or Google Assistant. But now regular mobile apps are using voice recognition software and AI to enhance user experience. We will also see augmented reality to be incorporated into more apps. These types of apps incorporate the real world into our app. One great example is Pokemon Go.
Paul: Yeah, so because the app was a huge success, more companies are going to try and use apps to drive engagement and revenue for their businesses. Also, cross-platform mobile development will take off many mobile app developers who want to launch the app for IOS and Android devices and will surely take advantage of React-native or Flutter because of the benefits that I mentioned earlier.
Additionally, we’d like to know what security measures or best practices should be considered when building and running mobile applications in 2023. Some security measures or best practices to protect mobile applications are optimizing data cashing, and implementing end-to-end data encryption using strong authentication mechanisms for optimizing data cashing.
We do this by choosing the right caching strategy using the appropriate cash storage and cash eviction policies and expiration time and monitoring and analyzing the cash performance on implementing end-to-end encryption.
Paul: However, there are plenty of open-source frameworks that you could use. This ensures that the data coming in and out are coming in and out of the application is secured.
We can implement app security best practices in our authentication system like implementing strong authentication mechanisms such as password-based authentication, biometric authentication, or multi-factor authentication.
These are just some of the fundamentals of security best practices in mobile application development.
Euluvye: Thank you so much for that insight. But before we wrap up this episode, can you share some of the projects you’re working on?
Paul: Sure. Right now, we have been working on one new project which is for our anchor client. We also have three ongoing projects. One of which is a social platform, a social app. The other one is a live-streaming app, so it’s an exciting app. So watch out.
Euluvye: So, yes, thank you again, Paul. There we have it on our third episode of Modern Way of building and running mobile applications with JWay mobile applications manager, Paul Sevilla. So catch us again on our next episode. Goodbye.