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Showing posts with the label mobile app development

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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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...

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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How GitHub Slashed iOS Testing Time with Innovative Runner Features Imagine waiting hours for your iOS app tests to complete, only to find out that a single test failed and you need to start over. For GitHub’s engineering team, this was a recurring challenge—until they introduced advanced runner features to their testing infrastructure. By optimizing their CI/CD pipeline, GitHub significantly reduced testing time, improved efficiency, and empowered developers to deliver high-quality iOS apps faster. In this blog post, we’ll explore how GitHub implemented these innovative runner features, the challenges they addressed, and the impact they had on their iOS development process. Whether you’re an iOS developer, a DevOps engineer, or a tech enthusiast, this story will inspire you to rethink how you approach testing in your projects. Image Credit: GitHub Engineering The Challenges of iOS Testing Before implementing the new runner features, GitHub’s iOS testing process faced seve...

The Hidden Costs of Sharing Code Between iOS and Android: Lessons from Dropbox

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Imagine making a feature once and saving time and resources, deploying it in both iOS and Android. Looks ideal, isn't it? For Dropbox, this approach looked like a no-grain-until they did not face the hidden costs of shared code between the platforms. While the idea of ​​cross-platform development promised efficiency, reality was far more complex. In this blog post, we will find out the journey of the Dropbox to share the code between iOS and Android, which faced challenges, and the lesson he learned on the way. Whether you are a mobile developer, a product manager, or a technical enthusiast, the story will provide valuable insight into the business-bounds of cross-platform development. Image Credit: Dropbox Tech Blog The Promise of Cross-Platform Code Sharing Dropbox initially shared the cross-platform code to streamline development and reduce repetition. This idea was simple: Write core logic once and reuse it in iOS and Android. This approach promised many benefits: Rapid de...

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