(Original creator: Rachid Siallioui)
To catch-up on the latest mobile security and native UI trends, the Uniface mobile development team recently attended the appDevcon conference. A conference by app developers, for app developers. An event which targets developers for Apple iOS and Google Android, Windows, Web, TV and IoT devices in multiple tracks.
In advance, we were especially interested in two main topics: smartphone security and sharing code between web and native apps.
Mobile security
The mobile security presentations were given by Daniel Zucker, a software engineer manager at Google, and Jan-Felix Schmakeit, an Android engineer also at Google. In their - in my view - impressive presentation, they confirmed what I already thought: securing mobile phones is not something which you do after you have designed and developed your apps. It is a key area of app development to consider in advance.
Securing mobile phones starts with a good understanding of the architecture of at least the Android and iOS platforms. How is it built up? For example, as Android is based on the Linux kernel, you get all the Linux security artefacts, like Process isolation, SELinux, verified boot and cryptography. While some security services provided to mobile apps have a platform specific nature, others are platform independent. An example of the first one is the new Android Permissions, which have now become more transparent to users, as they now get permission requests ‘in context’. An example of the platform independent security artefacts is the certificate validation, which done in an incorrect way, would still make your app vulnerable.
Native UI
Sharing code between native and web apps promised to be an interesting session. Some context: mobile users tend to spend significant more time on native UI enriched apps than on web apps, while web apps are attracting more unique visitors than native apps, as web apps are more widely approachable using different devices.
The best way to share code between native and web apps is simply by writing them as much as possible in the same code. Of course! But how do you do that? In this session the solution was to write fully native apps using a mix of NativeScript (an open-source framework to develop apps on iOS and Android platforms) and AngularJS (JavaScript-based open-source front-end web application framework). These native apps are built using platform agnostic programming languages such as JavaScript or TypeScript. They result in fully native Apps, which use the same APIs as if they were developed in Xcode or Android Studio. That is quite interesting! So using JavaScript you can develop fully native apps. That sounds like music to my ears.
Looking at this trend, it promises a lot. The mobile community seems to put a lot of effort in trying to simplify the creation of fully native enriched apps using plain JavaScript and HTML5 functionalities. Until now, we support our users in creating native/hybrid apps with fully native functionality with our Dynamic Server Page (DSP) technology. As we are looking into ways to enrich this technology further, we will follow the developments on this trend as it is fully in-line with our philosophy to share code between applications (client-server, web and mobile apps) and to support rapid application development, which saves our users time and resources in developing and maintaining fully enriched and cool applications.