Professional automated testing software is a solution to a common problem: how to produce high-quality, robust and reliable software with the ever-growing complexity of technology and under massive competitive pressure. Automated software testing is a cost-effective solution to this problem. In this article, Ville-Veikko Helppi will walk you through a sample use case for test automation and will provide a downloadable example to get you started. Also, he’ll focus on different aspects of mobile test automation and explain how this relatively new yet popular topic can help mobile app and game developers to build better, more robust products for consumers.
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Creating a new cross-platform native and web applications seamlessly on an entire back end for your mobile applications that is feature-complete in data synchronization, push-notification support, user management and file-handling before you even started building the mobile experience is exactly what providers of mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) are aiming to give app developers. It is up to you to determine whether that is true for the experiences you are creating.
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In this article, Alon Even will go over the importance of using visual mobile analytics to measure the user experience from day one, as well as provide examples and other insights, so that you can optimize your onboarding experience and increase your app’s retention rate. He will provide you with knowledge that you can apply to your own mobile app exploits, whether you are a developer or a mobile app publisher. While there is no magic bullet for creating a perfect onboarding experience, remaining focused and committed to monitoring your onboarding experience will get you further than any other strategy.
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In this article, Patrick Rudolph provides many hints, code snippets and lessons learned on how to build great hybrid mobile apps. He’ll briefly introduce hybrid mobile app development, including its benefits and drawbacks. Then, Patrick will share lessons he has learned from over two years of developing Hojoki and CatchApp, both of which run natively on major mobile platforms and were built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Finally, you’ll review the most prominent tools to wrap code in a native app.
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“Crashes” and “Not working” are the most common feedback on Google Play for unstable or sluggish apps. Lousy apps. Those comments and ratings make hundreds of millions of potential downloaders skip those apps. Sounds harsh, but that’s the way it is. The most successful mobile app developers understand the importance of performance, quality and robustness across the array of mobile devices that their customers use. But you must know that an app can behave differently on a variety mobile devices, even ones running the same OS version and identical hardware components.
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Building a native app with Flash might sound weird at first. In this article, Ala Ramildi and René Keller will share some insights on how they built a game for iOS that is written entirely in ActionScript! PixelMogul is the first game that they created entirely in house. Adobe AIR and Starling made it possible for them to carry over their experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform and to focus on development. The fast-growing and active Starling community was a big plus, too. They would definitively go the same route for another project of comparable scope.
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In this article, Matthew Andrews, a lead developer behind FT Labs, shares a few insights he had learned along the way while building the FT application. You’re going to make a simple offline-first to-do application with HTML5 technology. Matthew will also be running a “Making It Work Offline workshop” at our upcoming Smashing Conference in Freiburg in mid-September 2014.
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“Free Time” is an iPhone app that flips your calendar upside down and lets you focus on the free time in your day, instead of all the busy time. In this article, Ben Johnson will show you how it came to be and what his team ultimately learned in the process. Also he’ll give you some advice for when you build your next great idea. This is the story of how limitations led to his biggest success in the App Store — and his biggest failure.
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The reason why app store reviews aren’t as effective as they could be is that they’re a one-way conversation, asking the user to say something positive to everyone else. There should be something better, something more conversational. In this article, Joshua Mauldin will investigate the various tactics of prompting for app reviews and ratings and how to make them better. He’ll also talk about how to ask users for feedback in a way that benefits everyone. Getting feedback on your app is important. How else can people tell you that your app is doing well or poorly?
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As mobile browsers continue to improve, offering new features and enhancing performance, new opportunities like this will arise. It’s always important to question whether you should build a native app or a Web app, and keep in mind the pros and cons of each, especially because the differences in their capabilities are narrowing rapidly. In this article, Nick Jonas and Francis Villanueva Will discuss a few of the biggest challenges here: detecting user activity, achieving performant animations, and building an API integrated with Google Analytics.
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