Sometimes great results in code performance come with a small amount of work. We’d like to tell you a story about how we changed the Allegro mobile homepage and reduced usage of Allegro service infrastructure with only a few lines of code.
Currently, in the Android world, the topic of modularization is very popular. Many bloggers describe their experiences with it and analyze what Google recommends. Our team started the modularization process before it was hot. I will describe our reasons, decisions, problems and give you some advice. We will see if modularization makes sense and what it brings to the table. I will also post some statistics showing what it looked like before and after the modularization process.
In this article, we want to share our approach to using server-driven UI in native mobile apps. In 2019 we created the first version of the in-house server-driven rendering tool called MBox and used it to render the homepage in the Allegro app on Android and iOS. We have come a long way since then, and now we use this tool to render more and more screens in the Allegro apps. After almost three years of working on MBox, we want to share how it works and the key advantages and challenges of using this approach.
Will automatic UI tests be able to replace manual testers as artificial intelligence will try to replace programmers? I’ll show you how we write automatic UI tests on Android in Allegro Pay.
The source code of Allegro iOS app for buyers used to be divided into separate modules hosted in multiple repositories (polyrepo). The source code was migrated to a monorepo a few years back along with the history of all repos that constituted the app. Updating source code of a module on one repository could affect another module hosted on a separate repository. Versioning modules and propagation of dependency update led to long release process of the entire application. Our main repository for the iOS application thus became our monorepo. After 9 years of development of the app the repo size has grown enormously and the git clone command became a nightmare taking too much time. We had a possibility to shrink the project size during the migration from an on-premise to an external git repo hosting provider.
When we developed our Allegro iOS app adding new features and with more people contributing to the codebase, we noticed that build times began to grow. In order to have precise metrics, we started to track clean build time as well as the amount of code we had. Do these two metrics grow at the same pace?
The following article has two parts. The first part describes improving Allegro iOS app launch time by adopting static linking and sums it up with a speedup analysis. The second part describes how I managed to launch a custom macOS app using not-yet-fully-released dyld3 dynamic linker and also completes with an app launch speedup analysis.
Are you developing a service and planning to make it publicly available? Do you want developers of mobile applications to get integrated with your API fast and painless? Do you care how stable and predictable mobile applications using your service are?
This article tells a story of chasing an iOS bug – a bug hidden so deep that it required many different skills and debugging on different levels to identify it. I think every native mobile app developer (not only an iOS developer) will find this text interesting. Non-mobile developers may find it an intriguing read as well.
All over the Internet there are code snippets that show how to make a blur effect on Android. But if you want to introduce blur as a part of your app design and use it as an effect to hide content under dialogs, drawer etc. there is no ready solution for all UI components. That’s why I wrote the Fogger library.
Consider you are an Android application developer. You created a mobile application for your website and you would like to enable your users to browse content of your website using a mobile app. It’s easy if a website uses RESTful guidelines for creating URLs. Problem comes when a website uses SEO friendly URLs. Handling such links is hard because regular expression mechanism in Android manifest is flawed.
On 14 March, at 19.00 the 2nd edition of BrainCode Mobi, i.e. a mobile hackathon organised by Allegro became history. This event was special because it was held in four cities: Poznań, Warsaw, Toruń and Kraków.
At the beginning of December we published our first post about Swift. Today we want to continue the Swift thread and introduce a few interesting facts about functions in Swift language.
Two weeks ago, I attended Swift Warsaw as a speaker, holding a presentation on “Swift Runtime — Swift Method Dispatching”. I promised to summarise the talk in an article, so hereby I keep my promise.
Introduction of Swift programming language during WWDC 2014 was big news in developers’ world. The community warmly welcomed the language created by Apple and many developers started learning and using it immediately. This article explains what Swift is and its basic concepts. If you are an iOS (or OS X) developer it means that you probably already know all the things described below, but if you haven’t started your iOS development adventure yet (but you want to), this article could be a good introduction for you.
We live in a mobile-oriented world so it’s crucial to provide the best usability experience possible. In this post we show how you can preserve user’s context when installing a mobile application from a website.
