Do you need a dedicated mobile app, or is a website enough? — Mobile has changed the way we interact with products and services. Their always on, always available nature gives your organisation a ready-made channel for customer engagement. These statistics on mobile vs desktop usage in 2020 show that only 29% of global website visits came from desktop browsers, compared to 68%…

Switch off without losing users — You can’t guarantee that users will ever update to the latest version of an app, so you can expect that a few users will remain on every historic version of your app. APIs that support your app are likely to evolve. Maintaining and running old versions of an API is…

How iOS 14.5 will impact apps that use analytics, advertising, or tracking — As a consultant working with customers to develop mobile strategies and build apps, I’ve been watching the new Apple Privacy rules closely. They have been popular with users so far, so they look like they’re here to stay. If your business is built on tracking data, trading tracked data or…

Include wiki-style links on your site — Backlinks is a term used to describe the two-way, wiki-style links that are popular in note-taking tools such as Roam or Notion. Linking in two directions is useful because when you link from one article to another, you can also discover the first article from the second. I recently used…

Building iOS and Android apps with a single team — To build expert, mobile apps, you need mobile experts — if you are developing an app for both iOS and Android, you need experts in both iOS and Android. The Rolls-Royce approach is to create a sub-team of iOS specialists and a sub-team of Android specialists, each responsible for their…

Make the most of limited coding sessions — Writing an app in your spare time is difficult. Spare time is a luxury that many of us have little of. Opportunities to work on your app are few and far between, and sometimes you can go long periods of time without being able to sit down and focus on…

Why shipping regular updates is good for your development process and more — When you’re developing apps, at some point you need to release updates to your users. There are benefits to releasing updates frequently, but there are lots of factors that make it hard to do. In this article, I’ll explain why it’s good to make regular releases, what can get in…

For test, production and everything in between — When you’re developing iOS and android apps, your primary focus is on getting your apps out to end users. But when you’re making apps commercially, there are many stages they have to go through before they get anywhere near public release, and each stage requires our apps to be distributed…

The definitive guide to installing and updating pods — The difference between pod install and pod update is subtle, and it isn’t always clear which you should use. But having a good understanding of what these commands do gives you much finer control over how dependencies are managed in your project, so it’s worth knowing the difference. In the…