/Mobile

How To Store Your App's Entire State In The URL

- Scott Antipa tl;dr: "I wanted a way for people to use it without having to sign in, or store any data on our server. I wanted to give them control over their data and to be able to store it locally to open and edit later. And also easily share it with other people. It's easy to do this by supporting file upload/download, but I wanted something simpler, like the ability to share by sending a url."

featured in #379

Accidental $70k Google Pixel Lock Screen Bypass

- David Schütz tl;dr: "I found a vulnerability affecting seemingly all Google Pixel phones where if you gave me any locked Pixel device, I could give it back to you unlocked. The bug just got fixed in the November 5, 2022 security update. The issue allowed an attacker with physical access to bypass the lock screen protections (fingerprint, PIN, etc.) and gain access to the user’s device."

featured in #367

Prioritizing App Stability - Mobile Performance @ Lyft

- Wen Zhao tl;dr: We focused our investment in mobile performance into the 3 metrics with the highest opportunity for improvement: (1) Time to interact: continuing reducing app startup time. (2) Stability: reducing the number of crashes any given user experiences. (3) Rendering performance: maintaining a high, buttery smooth frame rate. 

featured in #358

Cramming 'Papers, Please' Onto Phones

- Lucas Pope tl;dr: "I created Papers, Please in 2013 specifically for desktop computers with mouse control. Now, here, in 2022, desktop computers no longer exist and all computing is done via handheld mobile telephone. Time to update this dinosaur."

featured in #342

The Cost Of A Byte

- Noah Martin tl;dr: “Researchers from MIT, Purdue, and Yale demonstrated that turning off the camera during a Zoom meeting shrinks the environmental footprint by 96%.” This inspired Noah to think about a mobile app’s carbon footprint and he shows us how adding or removing 1MB in app size can have a surprisingly large impact.

featured in #288

How To Deal With Tech Debt At The Scale Of Super App

- Maksim Koutun tl;dr: "We want to share how we decided to work with technical debt and how Evolutionary architecture and SRE help us balance innovation and quality in mobile development." Maksim provides several examples, such as how each team can dedicate up to 20% of their capacity to technical improvements.

featured in #283

The Building Blocks Of Scale

- Kayla Kasprak tl;dr: Specific to mobile teams: (1) Smaller, more specialized teams to reduce communication overhead and have more specialized knowledge. (2) Organized, testable code so that "each software module should have one and only one reason to change.” (3) Well-reasoned architecture. Kayla mentions 4 types that work at scale. (4) Continuous evolution.

featured in #254

Mobile Platform Teams

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "The idea of setting up a mobile platform team will probably come around to you if your area has around 20 or more mobile engineers working on one or more apps." Gergely talks through how to approach this and challenges ahead.

featured in #224

10 Engineering Challenges Due To The Nature Of Mobile Applications

- Gergely Orosz tl;dr: "I hope this piece helps non-mobile engineers build empathy for the type of challenges and tradeoffs mobile engineers face and be a conversation starter between backend, web and mobile teams."

featured in #218

Announcing Mobile First Indexing For The Whole Web

- John Mueller tl;dr: Google will be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020. 

featured in #176