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Plan your iOS app release to avoid late updates during the holiday seasons. (Dec 23 - Dec 27)

🔥 Top Mobile News

Releases:

• Kotlin Plugin Released With IDEA 2020.3

• Revamped Kotlin Documentation – Give It a Try

• Deep Learning With Kotlin: Introducing KotlinDL-alpha

• App Store Connect Update

• macOS Big Sur 11.1 RC (20C69)

• iOS 14.3 RC 2 (18C66), iPadOS 14.3 RC 2

• Expo SDK 40 is now available

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News:

• Apple officially announces AirPods Max for $549 - Apple’s long-rumored over-ear headphones are officially here. AirPods Max features an over-ear design, deep integration with the rest of Apple’s ecosystem, the H1 chip, and more. They are available to order for $549, with the first orders arriving next week.

• Google’s Year in Search 2020 recaps turbulent times that had everyone asking ‘why’ [Video]

• Google Photos now lets you sync your liked images with Apple Photos on iOS - After recently hitting the 5 billion download milestone on Android, Google Photos is looking to target the other side of the mobile OS fence with some new features. For those using an iOS device, Google Photos now offers the ability to sync your liked content with Apple Photos.

• You can now add tweets to your snaps - Twitter is making it even easier to spread your tweets far and wide to every social media platform imaginable. Starting today on iOS (support is coming “soon” for Android), you’ll be able to add tweets into a snap as a sticker.

• Sony is buying anime streaming service Crunchyroll from AT&T for $1.175 billion - Sony will be buying anime streaming service Crunchyroll from AT&T for $1.175 billion, Sony and AT&T announced Wednesday. Specifically, Crunchyroll will become part of Sony’s Funimation, which already licenses many popular shows such as Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, and One Piece.

• Tripadvisor app pulled from App Store in China, with 104 other apps - The Tripadvisor app has been pulled from Apple’s App Store, along with 104 other apps. The Chinese government said that this was part of a ‘clean up’ of the Internet – though it has likely been done for political reasons. Apple has also sent an email to Chinese games developers who have not yet provided proof of approval from the government, warning them that their apps will be removed on January 1

• California finally rolls out COVID-19 iPhone contact tracing based on Apple’s Exposure Notifications - After launching a pilot program for digital contact tracing last month, the state of California has made contract tracing available today, December 10. That’s about half a year after Apple/Google made the feature available on iPhone and Android. But better late than never as the support will allow the almost 40 million people living in California to stay safer amid the pandemic.

• Tim Cook to deliver a speech at the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit this weekend - As reported by Reuters, Apple has announced that CEO Tim Cook will speak at the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit this weekend. Cook will deliver the address on Saturday, December 12, alongside a lineup of other speakers and guests.

• Apple to ban X-Mode tracking SDK from the App Store, developers given two weeks to comply - Apple and Google are both cracking down on applications that integrate the X-Mode Social tracking software. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Apple has informed developers that they have two weeks to remove X-Mode’s trackers from their applications.

• A bug that disables all on-device sensors supposedly spreading to some Pixel 5 units - A long-standing device sensor issue that has affected a minority of Pixel owners now appears to be affecting some Pixel 5 units.

🍎 iOS Articles

• Swift for TensorFlow: Training your first model - Tomás Ruiz López

• Let's build @State - Federico

• Showing Maps in Widgets - Keith Harrison

• Styling custom SwiftUI views using the environment - Majid

• The lifecycle and semantics of a SwiftUI view - John Sundell

• Observing the result of saving a background managed object context with Combine - Donny Wals

🤖 Android Articles

• Improving urban GPS accuracy for your app - Frank van Diggelen & Jennifer Wang

• 3 Crucial Concepts of gRPC in Android - Vlad Sonkin

• KTX: Graphics - Mark Allison

• All you need to know about ArrayMap & SparseArray - Alexey Bykov

• Android Views as a Function of State with ViewBinding Case Study 1: The Live Game Stream - TJ

• How to make a RecyclerView in Jetpack Compose - Ian Alexander

• Kotlin Synthetic is Dead, Long Live ViewBinding (Kotlin Android Extensions Deprecated) - Mustafa Yiğit

• 📺 Android Developer Story: Composing musical entertainment with Kotlin - Android Developers

⚔️ Flutter & React Native

Flutter

• Using json_serializable to Serialise Dart/Flutter Models - Paul Halliday

• Multi-Device Debugging with Flutter and VS Code - Paul Halliday

• Navigate with Named Routes in Flutter - Suraj Gupta

• GridView List Widget In Flutter - Naveen Srivastava

• Slidable Tile In Flutter - Shaiq khan

• Flutter: Faking/stubbing backend responses - Pavel Sulimau

React Native

• How to create a custom scrollbar with React Native Animated API - Aman Mittal

• React Navigation in 10 Minutes – A Quick and Complete Guide - Akash Mittal

• Stripe in-app payments in React Native - Masimo Orbanic

• Why should I use firebase firestore on my React Native app - Malick Mbengue

• React Native Livestream Application using Agora - Mohan Raj

📈 Trending Dev blogs

• GitHub repositories to improve your programming skills - Marko Denic

• 101 Tips to Make You a Better Developer - Simon Holdorf

• UI Design Trend of 2021 - Harsh Singh

• Questions YOU should ask when being interviewed - Dimitris Platis

• How I use Notion as a developer - Rui Sousa

• Learn GraphQL in 7 minutes! - Rishav Jadon

• iOS Development How & Where to Start - Nedim F

🛠 Dev Tools & Open Source

• Palms - Large set of palms to describe your idea

• Slideflow - Turn your Google Slides into a website in seconds.

• create-node-cli - CLI to create new Node.js CLI applications

• Browser as API - Fast, scalable, and reliable browser automation built for businesses and developers. Proudly open source.

• TriggerMesh - Modernize Enterprise Applications By Tying Together Cloud and On-Premises

• Nine - The easiest way to sell subscription products.

• Coding Rooms - Superpowers for Programming Teachers

• Mapbox GL JS - Mapbox GL JS is a JavaScript library for vector maps on the Web. Its performance, real-time styling, and interactivity features set the bar for anyone building fast, immersive maps on the web.

• surge - Surge is a 100% decentralized and secure P2P file sharing client. It utilizes the NKN blockchain network to send, publish, and receive files.

• Froala Charts - Interactive charts to build insightful data visualizations in your web or mobile apps

• Codebooks - Codebooks delivers your project documentation beautifully in just a few steps. Skip the mess of hosting and building so you can focus on code

• Everypixel - All the stunning seamless patterns in our collection can be tuned-up by editing colors, scale, and elements size right inside the premade templates. Download for free, no copyrights, no royalties, no other legal issues to worry about.

🎤 Events & Webinars

Event Sneak peek: droidcon APAC — Sneak Peek

GitHub Universe 2020 - Opening keynote

December

• Dec 14 - 15 : (virtual) Droidcon APAC ($30 – $80)

January 2021

• Jan 12 - (Call for Paper) - Android Worldwide

• Jan 18 - Jan 22 (Call for Paper) - iOS Conf SG - 2021 (S$60 & S$210)

☕️☕️☕️ That's it, folks. Hope you enjoyed the article. If you like to support my work on this, consider buying a coffee for me. It would be a great help.

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