This Week in Mobile: Getting Ready for Swift 4

Just one week to go to WWDC, the highlight of the year for iOS developers across the world. For now, here's a bunch of new on Swift 4, and more analysis of Google I/O.

iOS 

The brilliant Erica Sadun brings us through Five Easy Dispatch Tricks that will make your concurrent code easier to follow. 

I’m sure we’ll be reading a lot more about Swift 4 very soon, but for now here’s a good introduction into the changes for Encoding and Decoding in Swift 4. If working with JSON has been giving you headaches, this is the medicine you need. For a more complete view of what’s new in Swift 4, check out this guide from Hacking With Swift.

Have you ever wondered Should Outlets Be Weak or Strong? While you might follow Apple’s recommendation and use strong, it’s good to have an understanding of the differences. 

Check out this guide on How To Build a Table View With Collapsible Sections, which continues from a previous article explaining how to adopt Protocols and MVVM with table views. 

If you’re an API developer, you really should read Using @autoclosure When Designing Swift APIs, which gives some excellent use cases and examples. 

Some projects to check out: 

• MarkdownView: Markdown view for iOS.
• Hanson: Lightweight observations and bindings in Swift. 
• swift-deep-linking: A simple way to consume deep link URLs in a Swift app. 
• VNImageScanner: A usable and simple camera component class united into a single UIView.

Android 

Still trying to catch up on all the Google I/O news? Check out this list of the most promising breakthroughs from the event.

Joe Birch has done an exceptional job in Exploring the New Android Architecture Components Library, announced at Google I/O a few weeks ago. 

The Improved Android Plugin, 3.0.0-alpha1 brings a number of improvements in performance and bug fixes. For those of us putting up with slow build times, it could be worth migrating your project to this plugin… provided you’re not in production, of course!

With all the news around Kotlin, you’re bound to want to get your teeth into it. Here’s how to Integrate Kotlin Into Your Complex Android Project, including dealing with Dagger and Mockito.

Some projects to check out: 

• MaterialShadows: A library for supporting convex material shadows. 
• EasyTransition: A light shared elements transition lib for Android. 
• HueSeekBar: Yet another Android seeker inspired from Philips Hue app.

General 

The Science Behind Apps Going Viral looks at examples like Instagram and Flappy Bird to help make sense of why some apps succeed where others fail. 

Speaking of app success, Stephen Coyle examples how much his app has earned after a year on the App Store.