MDC Weekly Blend — Edition #9

Apple Special Event for new iPhones, Dart 2.10 release, Swift Algorithms and Swift atomics by swift.org, Kotlin public roadmap and lot more in this issue.

Oct 9, 2020

Hello 👋,

Hope everyone is doing great. Apple announced a special Apple Event on Oct 13 at 10 am PDT for the new iPhone release under the tag name "Hi, Speed.". You can live stream the event here.

😮 Do you like to customize the icons on your iPhone? An artist makes over $100K selling app icons to iOS 14 users 💰.

If you think this newsletter would be useful to your colleagues, friends, or any mobile developers, you can now just forward this email to them.

Stay safe and keep coding.

🔥 Top Mobile News

Microsoft Says App Stores should be more competitive - Microsoft said on Thursday that it would give developers more control in its app store, providing a sharp contrast to Apple, which is facing growing pressure for its firm grip on its App Store.
App Store Connect for iOS updated with TestFlight integration - Apple updated its App Store Connect app for iOS with some great new features. Developers will now be able to set up and manage TestFlight apps right on their iPhone and iPad through the App Store Connect app.
Apple officially announces iPhone 12 event for October 13 - ‘Hi, Speed’ - Apple has officially announced its highly anticipated iPhone 12 event for October 13 at 10 a.m. PT. Much like WWDC 2020 and the September “Time Flies” event, the iPhone 12 announcement event will be completely virtual and streamed directly from Apple Park.
Turn back time with your Instagram icon; new features, too - If you want to switch up your Instagram icon, you don’t need to create a shortcut to do it. To celebrate the app’s 10th birthday, the company has included an easter egg that lets you switch back to the original icon — or even earlier.
Apple Music gets dedicated Disney page for soundtracks, playlists, radio stations - Disney and Apple have had a close relationship over the decades and the latest integration between the two sees Disney gain a dedicated destination on Apple Music that features the best place to listen to your favorite soundtracks, radio stations, and playlists.
App Store gives Apple ‘monopoly power’ over iOS apps, US House antitrust report says [U: Apple responds] - The Democratic Subcommittee on the U.S. House Judiciary today shared its recommendations to change antitrust laws and prevent anti-competitive practices by big companies like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook. This follows a 16-month investigation into these companies to reform the laws in the digital age.
Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Meet getting new icons as part of Google Workspace - As part of Google Workspace, the company is rolling out new branding for its productivity apps. Gmail — as teased last month — will be getting a new icon, with Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Meet also following over the coming weeks.
‘Sound Notifications’ Android accessibility app lets your phone notify you of important noises - Over the years, Google has worked hard to add accessibility features to Android, both to make Android itself more accessible and to use Android’s smarts to make the world more accessible. The latest Android accessibility feature, Sound Notifications, can alert those with hearing loss to any important noises nearby.

Dev News

Apple Dev: Deadline extended for app updates using UIWebView - Now you have more time to update the app using UIWebView.
Apple Developer app updates for the United Kingdom and Ireland - Now it’s simpler than ever for developers based in the United Kingdom and Ireland to enroll in the Apple Developer Program
Announcing the launch of the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative - Google’s Android Security & Privacy team has launched the Android Partner Vulnerability Initiative (APVI) to manage security issues specific to Android OEMs. The APVI is designed to drive remediation and provide transparency to users about issues we have discovered at Google that affect device models shipped by Android partners.
Kotlin Public Roadmap Through Spring 2021 - Jetbrains announced the public roadmap for Kotlin. This document describes the biggest projects our team is working on right now. It has a 6-month time frame and will be updated every 3 months.
Announcing Swift Algorithms - A new open-source package of sequence and collection algorithms, along with their related types.
Introducing Swift Atomics - A new open-source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code. The goal of this library is to enable intrepid systems programmers to start building synchronization constructs (such as concurrent data structures) directly in Swift.
Announcing Dart 2.10 - A new, unified dart tool for all core tasks. Also, an update on null safety timelines and migration principles.
Apple Dev: New subscription server notifications available to test - App Store server notifications provide real-time updates on a subscriber’s status, so you can create customized user experiences

🍎 iOS Articles

Transactions in SwiftUI - Swift With Majid
Testing networking logic in Swift - Swift by Sundell
Lazy property observers - Swift by Sundell
Do protocols break Single Responsibility Principle? - Dmitrii Ivanov
Swift deinit is (sometimes) not called for throwing or failable initializers - Jessie Squires
An Introduction to LLDB Reproducers - Daniel Martin in PSPDFKIT Blog
The Modern Ways to Reload Your Table and Collection View Cells - Swift Senpai
Understanding the differences between your Core Data model and managed objects - Donny Wals
Reduce boilerplate code with an automatic synthesis of Equatable and Hashable conformance - Sarun
A (Business Hat) Case Against Adopting SwiftUI Today - Jason Zurita
🔊Adventure into Widgets - with Scriptable developer Simon Støvring - Swift by Sundell Podcasts
🔊Episode 9: Just Enough Research - Code Completion on topics: New A14 performance leaks, Integrating Accessibility in your apps, Testing your apps with real users. You can watch the podcast's video version here.
📺SwiftUI 2.0 CardView with Lottie Animation - UL Dara

🤖 Android Articles

Kotlin Flow in Android — Process asynchronous stream - Gaurav Goyal in Android@Microsoft
Delegating Delegates to Kotlin - Murat Yener in Android Developers
Don’t argue with default arguments - Florina Muntenescu in Android Developers
Jetpack Compose ViewPager - Jorge Castillo
Biometric Authentication on Android - Part 1 & Part 2 - Isai Damier in Android Developers
Android Package Visibility And Horse Blinkers - Vlad Sonkin
DataStore: Models - Mark Allison in Styling Android
Make your app shine on Google Play - Padmini Murthy in Google Play Dev Blog
kotlinx.serialization 1.0 released - Sebastian Aigner in Kotlin
Android Emulator in a CI environment - Lingfeng Yang
Using Github Actions to Automate Our Release Process - Rebecca Franks

⚔️ Flutter & React Native

🛠 Dev Tools & Open-source libraries

Tools

Stanza - Learn new coding concepts faster. Short texts 🧑‍💻 Code snippets ✍️ Reading lists 👀
gazepass - Passwordless multi-factor authentication for any website or mobile app
Taskade - All-in-One Collaboration. Chat, Organize, Get Things Done

Libraries / Open Source

Kotlin∇: Type-safe Symbolic Differentiation for Kotlin - Kotlin∇ is a type-safe automatic differentiation framework in Kotlin. It allows users to express differentiable programs with higher-dimensional data structures and operators
Konfetti 🎊 - [Kotlin] 🥳 Celebrate more with this lightweight confetti particle system. Create realistic confetti by implementing this easy to use the library.
clean_settings 0.1.3 - [Flutter] Creating a settings screen requires the same boilerplate code over and over. Settings also need a rich set of widgets to cover all possible cases. This library aims to provide sane defaults while creating a setting screen.

🎤 Events & Webinars

October

Oct 6 - 9 (Virtual): UXDX (€225 to €600)
Oct 8 - 9 (Virtual): droidCON EMEA
Oct 8 - 9 (Virtual): Pragma Conference 2020
Oct 8 (Virtual): Android Summit - $79
Oct 8 - 9 (Virtual): Google Assistant Developer Day - Free
Oct 12 - 16 (Virtual): Kotlin 1.4 Event - Join for a deep dive into the latest release, and mingle with the JetBrains Kotlin team!
Oct 13 (Virtual): Apple Special Event - Free
Oct 21 (Virtual): App Growth Summit SF 2020
Oct 27 - Oct 28 (Virtual): Firebase Summit - Free
[Cancelled] - Swift Leeds

November

Nov 3 - 4: MobileOne
Nov 9 - 17: HXLive (£99, with discounts on bulk booking)
Nov 10 - 11: Smashing Conference (Early Bird $175, then $225)
Nov 11 - 14: Mobius (11500 ₽ to 46000 ₽)
Nov 16 - 17: (Virtual) Droidcon Americas ($48 – $120)
Nov 18: App Growth Summit Singapore 2020
Nov 21 - 22: Devfest Siberia (Early Bird: 1500₽)
Nov 27 - 28: Droidcon Italy - The webinar series - Free

December

Dec 8 - 10: GitHub Universe · Virtual 2020 - Free
Dec 14 - 15 : (virtual) Droidcon APAC ($30 – $80)

☕️☕️☕️ 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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