This Week in Mobile: Lessons From iMessage App Store and Understanding ConstraintLayout

This week, Airbnb launched Lottie; a library that renders After Effects animations in real time on Android, iOS and React Native. It seems like a great way to get rich animations into your app without too much effort. 

iOS

Looking for a listing of everything that's new in the latest version of Swift? Look not further than What's New in Swift 3.1.

After the announcement of the iMessage App Store, it seemed that building your own iMessage app would be a good idea. Is it a worthwhile pursuit? Read about this developer's first three months on the iMessage App Store and find out.

The latest beta of iOS allows users to submit a star rating for your app without leaving it. While it's a nice change, Oisin Prenderville has a suggestion for an alternative design, based on the theory that Notifications are Better Than Alerts.

Here's an essential tip about Non-contiguous Raw Value Enumerations in Swift. Straight away you can see how it's a useful way of creating an enumeration for status codes.

Learn how to avoid having a choppy UI with this tutorial on Smooth Scrolling in UITableView and UICollectionView.

Some projects to check out: 

• IBAnalyzer: Find common xib and storyboard-related problems without running your app or writing unit tests

• Dotzu: iOS app debugger while using the app. Crash report, logs, network.

• lottie-ios: An iOS library to natively render After Effects vector animations http://airbnb.design/lottie/

• Xniffer: A swift network profiler built on top URLSession

Android 

The third part of a series on ConstraintLayout takes a look at Animations and Dynamic Constraints. If you've been putting off a move to using this layout, this series is a great way to catch up. 

Modularization is a great architecture, but did you know that it can affect the build time of your app? Learn what makes things faster; and what makes things crawl! 

If you've just started using RxJava, make sure that you have a good understanding by running through these Practical Challenges for RxJava Learners.

Here's a listing of 10 Tools to Increase Your Android Productivity; very welcome if you feel like you could be doing better.

Some projects to check out: 

• lottie-android: Render After Effects animations natively on Android and iOS

• CoordinatorTabLayout: Combination of TabLayout and CoordinatorLayout.

• android-mvp-architecture: This repository contains a detailed sample app that implements MVP architecture using Dagger2, GreenDao, RxJava2, FastAndroidNetworking and PlaceholderView

• android-sumbit-credit-card-flow: Implementation of credit card form in material design

• ason: JSON in Java made easy!

General 

Every app developer should take a little time out to follow this Crash Course on UI Design 

Giving users too much choice sometimes leads to friction, and makes progression through an app difficult. That's where Anticipated User Experiences come into play.

Ever wonder what non-tech people are thinking when you're talking about work on the bus? Here's an insight into What Non-Tech Workers Think Tech Jargon Means.