This Week in Mobile: Instant Apps, Google Play, and Swift 3.0

This was a huge week for Android, with Google I/O announcing a host of interesting news and updates. If Android isn't your thing, we've got lots of iOS related news for you too.

Android 

In case you missed it, I put together an article summarizing the key announcements.

While the Wear 2.0 and Android N previews were interesting, the eye-catching news was around Instant Apps, where you can run an Android app without needing to install. The expansion of Firebase to an all-encompassing area for every aspect of app management was a highlight too. 

There was a lot of hype around Google Play coming to Chrome OS, something that has been rumored for the last few weeks. 

Maybe Google's Awareness API is what you're looking for to build an app with a difference, making them context aware. Once you put your trust in certain apps, they can do "stuff" based on what various sensors on your phone pick up. 

Ever considering Building Your Own Dependency Injection Library? This video shows you how to follow some of the key features of Guice and Dagger for your own Android apps. 

It would seem that Android is Eating Apple's Market Share Everywhere. Are you seeing this trend in your own userbase? 

Honestly, the Firebase enhancements are amazing. You should check out this article about the new Firebase Crash Reporting. 

Animate all the things. Transitions in Android is an enjoyable read about how to get the most out of animations in Material Design apps.

Maybe it's time to consider branching out into VR, with Daydream on the way this fall.
 

Finally, here are some Android projects for you to try out: 

• NavigationTabStrip: Navigation tab strip with smooth interactions.

• butterknife: Bind Android views and callbacks to fields and methods.

• SwipeBackHelper: Swipe to close your activity .

• Fragmentation: A powerful library to manage fragments in Android.
  
  

iOS

Learn why Twitter's team went about Building Fabric.app in Swift.

There's a great four part series on Pattern Matching in Swift. It's the ideal way to learn everything you need to know on the topic.

I still need to find to time to delve into the details of what's going on with Swift 3.0. Thankfully, the guys at Hacking With Swift have put together detailed code examples of what's changing.

Advanced Graphics With Core Animation, a talk by Tim Oliver, will help you raise your animation game.

10 Thousand Times Faster Swift talks through some potential performance optimizations that might speed up your app. 

Swift Functional Programming: Basic Concepts looks at the simpler parts of functional programming, and how Swift supports it. 

Some Swift projects for your consideration:

• PMAlertController: A great and customizable substitute to UIAlertController.

• ParticlesLoadingView: A customizable SpriteKit particles animation on the border of a view.

• preview-transition: PreviewTransition is a simple preview gallery controller.

• Unbox: The easy to use Swift JSON decoder.

General

We all have unproductive days; here are six ways to recover from any one of them. 

According to Dan Maccarone & Sarah Doody, The UX of Learning UX is Broken. Do you agree?

Lionhead was a huge gaming studio, behind some great games, such as the Fable series. Learn the (complicated) inside story of Peter Molyneux's company.

Finally, make sure to read eBay MIND Patterns, with frontend coding patterns (and anti-patterns) for building accessible e-commerce web pages, widgets and workflows.