Native Mobile Development

Preface

Why We Wrote This Book

This book is a practical cross-reference for iOS and Android native development. By “native” we mean the original, provided toolsets for each platform—Swift and Cocoa for iOS, and Java or Kotlin with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) software development kit (SDK) for Android.

We were motivated to write this book out of common need. Both authors have experience with both platforms but specialize in one. Members of our team (including ourselves) would find themselves working on a problem we encountered in one platform, determine a solution to that problem in that platform, and then need to share that solution with the team members working on the other platform.

Often, these were common tasks like reading or writing to or from a database or files, making a network connection, or showing user feedback in a way that’s familiar to users. When we started codifying and documenting these tasks, in both platforms, it quickly became apparent that a very large majority of application code fell into one of these categorizations and that a reference source for all of them could be valuable to teams with a similar makeup, teams starting a transition to another platform, or even developers who wanted to start learning both platforms at the same time.

We hope that this book will provide that resource for the most common mobile development tasks to its readers.

Having an entire team of mobile developers with varying levels of cross-platform experience, we were ...