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Showing posts with the label SwiftUI

How WhatsApp Made Key Transparency Work (And Why It Matters)

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How WhatsApp's Key Transparency Changed the Game for Encrypted Messaging Okay so let's talk about something actually important for once - how WhatsApp made their encryption more trustworthy without making us jump through hoops. You know how every messaging app claims to be "secure" these days? Well WhatsApp actually put their money where their mouth is with this Key Transparency thing. Let me explain why this matters more than you might think. Visual from their tech docs - looks complicated but trust me it's cool The Big Problem Nobody Talks About So we all know WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption. Great. But here's the sketchy part nobody mentions - how do you REALLY know you're talking to who you think you are? Like, what if: Some hacker swapped the encryption keys without you knowing? There's a middleman reading your messages right now? The app itself got compromised somehow? Scary stuff right? That's where Key Trans...

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How Facebook Finally Fixed Their Messy iOS App (And Why It Mattered)

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Let’s be real - Facebook’s iOS app used to be a dumpster fire. Slow. Buggy. Crashed if you looked at it wrong. But here’s the wild part - they completely rebuilt the dang thing while BILLIONS of people were using it daily. No big deal right? Here’s the untold story of how they pulled it off without breaking everything. “Before” vs “After” - way less spaghetti code! The Hot Mess They Started With Back in like 2019, Facebook’s codebase was what devs nightmares are made of: 15+ years of legacy Objective-C piled up Build times longer than Avengers Endgame (seriously - 45+ mins) 500+ engineers stepping on each other’s code daily New features took weeks to implement cuz of dependencies One engineer told me: “It felt like changing tires on a moving Ferrari. While on fire.” The Breaking Point Three things forced them to act: App size ballooned to 400MB+ (users were deleting it) App Store rejection became weekly occurrence Top engineers were quitting cuz...

Unlocking SwiftUI at Airbnb: A Deep Dive into Modern UI Development

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Imagine building a house where every room is designed by a different architect, each using their own unique blueprint. Now, imagine trying to make all those rooms feel like they belong to the same home. This is the challenge Airbnb faced with its iOS app, where multiple UI frameworks and legacy codebases created inconsistency and inefficiency. Enter SwiftUI , Apple’s declarative UI framework, which promised to streamline development and unify the user experience. In this blog post, we’ll explore how Airbnb embraced SwiftUI, the technical challenges they overcame, and the lessons they learned along the way. Whether you’re an iOS developer, a product manager, or a tech enthusiast, this deep dive will provide valuable insights into modern UI development. Why SwiftUI? SwiftUI, introduced by Apple in 2019, is a declarative framework for building user interfaces across Apple platforms. Unlike UIKit, which uses an imperative approach, SwiftUI allows developers to describe wh...

Lottie 4.0 for iOS: A New Era of Animation

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Example Lottie animations included in Airbnb’s iOS app Imagine a world where designers and developers work in perfect harmony, where stunning animations can be created and integrated into apps with minimal effort. This is the vision behind Lottie , Airbnb’s open-source animation library that has revolutionized the way animations are handled in mobile apps. With the release of Lottie 4.0 for iOS , Airbnb is taking this vision to the next level. In this blog post, we’ll explore the new features and improvements in Lottie 4.0, how it simplifies animation workflows, and why it’s a game-changer for iOS developers. Whether you’re a designer, a developer, or a tech enthusiast, this deep dive will provide valuable insights into the future of animation in mobile apps. What is Lottie? Lottie is an open-source library that renders animations exported from Adobe After Effects as JSON files. It allows developers to integrate high-quality animations into their apps without writing complex co...

How Airbnb Revolutionized iOS UI Development with Epoxy

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How Airbnb's Epoxy Framework Solved Our Biggest iOS UI Headaches (And How You Can Use It Too) If you've ever built a complex iOS interface with UIKit, you know the pain. Massive view controllers. Endless delegate methods. State management spaghetti code. By 2018, Airbnb's iOS codebase was drowning in these problems - until they built Epoxy , a declarative UI framework that completely changed their approach to iOS development. The difference between traditional UIKit and Epoxy - less code, fewer bugs Why UIKit Was Failing Airbnb Airbnb's app had grown into one of the most complex iOS codebases in the world: 300+ unique screen types 5,000+ UI components 40+ engineers committing daily The traditional UIKit approach was crumbling under this scale: The 5 Worst UIKit Pain Points View controllers with 3,000+ lines of UI code Crash-prone manual diffing in tables/collections State spread across 10+ properties per screen Brittle inherita...

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