(Original creator: Pratibha)
Last month, the Uniface mobile team added support for the latest mobile operating systems (OSs) available in the market. Since both Apple and Google have released new versions of their latest OS, we wanted to make sure that Uniface mobile apps can be run and deployed on them. So from now on, Uniface customers can run and deploy their mobile apps on Android OS versions from 4.4 up to Android 8.0 Oreo and on iOS from iOS 8.0.0 to iOS 11.0.0. To take advantage of the support for the new versions, all that customers will need to do is recompile their apps using Uniface and Buildozer. For us, adding support for the latest mobile OS means making sure that a Uniface mobile app successfully runs on all these above-mentioned OSs and a Uniface mobile app can be deployed on these OSs. If a mobile app is not compatible with a mobile device’s OS then Google Play or the App Store would filter the app from the 'app to install list' making it difficult to deploy on that device. To verify these scenarios, we developed our own mobile app and tested it on all the platforms in the product availability matrix. The Uniface previewer app’s latest release is an example of a Uniface mobile app which can be run and deployed on iOS 11 and Android 8.0.
I would also like to mention that now we have made our apps forward compatible for both Android and iOS. To illustrate, here is an example:
- a Uniface app is built and deployed on O.S ‘x’
- a user device goes for a system update
- this results in upgrading the OS to ‘x+1’
- the Uniface app would continue to work on the later OS.
Personally, I really enjoyed working in this project. This gave us a better insight of a mobile app development and deployment cycle. We hope our customers find this as useful as we do.