I'd still like to cover a few independent developer apps and projects in a separate series, so don't by shy - if you've got something that DZone could spotlight, let me know in the comments.

Design 

iOS9 hasn't hurt battery life on my phone, but a lot of apps tend to take a whole chunk of your battery power (and your data allowance too!). Matt Galligan put together a great post on this topic entitled Battery life, load times and actually giving a shit about your customers.

The Verge have a great article on audio branding with Skype in Sound Decision.

Benedict Evans puts forward his views on why Mobile is not a neutral platform.

Are you guilty of putting too much motion and animation in your app interfaces? If you suspect the answer is yes, check out Your UI isn't a Disney Movie.

Read Rebekah Wolf's opinions on App Exploration for Apple TV.

Android 

See The Difference Between iOS and Android Security

If you've been considering trying out RxJava in your app, check out Juan Gomez's Intro to Functional Reactive Programming. 

Realm also have an interesting, and dramatically titled video on Kotlin: A New Hope in a Java 6 Wasteland. And while you're in the Kotlin mindset, check out these reasons to try Kotlin on Android

Retrofit is a really popular library across Android apps, and this article will explain how to Upgrade from 1.9 to Retrofit 2.

Some projects on GitHub to watch out for: 

• leakcanary: a memory leak detection library for Android

• FabricView: a new canvas drawing library

• smile: Statistical Machine Intelligence and Learning Engine

• beauty-treatment-android-animations: a set of examples of slick interaction patterns and animations.

iOS 

Now that Swift 2.0 is out for all to enjoy, become a guru by discovering some Hidden Gems in Swift You Didn't Know About.

Ever wondered if the libraries in your app are popular with the leading apps? Wonder no more, and check out Libraries Used in the Top 100 iOS Apps.

Some new Swift projects I've noticed this week: 

• SwiftRandom: a project for generating random data for your app.

• SwiftGo: Go's concurrency features made available for Swift 2

• Reachability.swift: A replacement for Apple's Reachability

• SwiftDate: Easy NSDate Management in Swift.

Trivia

Ever think that a comment could be the reason your website runs slow? Check out this optimization advice for Node.js applications!