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Native Mobile Development - A Cross-Reference for iOS and Android by Shaun Lewis and Mike Dunn

Book Summary

Learn how to make mobile native app development easier. If your team frequently works with both iOS and Android — or plans to transition from one to the other — this hands-on guide shows you how to perform the most common development tasks in each platform. Want to learn how to make network connections in iOS? Or how to work with a database in Android? This book has you covered.

In the book’s first part, authors Shaun Lewis and Mike Dunn from O’Reilly’s mobile engineering group provide a list of common, platform-agnostic tasks. The second part helps you create a bare-bones app in each platform, using the techniques from part one.

Common file and database operations
Network communication with remote APIs
Application lifecycle
Custom views and components
Threading and asynchronous work
Unit and integration tests
Configuring, building, and running an app on a device

From the Preface

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 Android Java or Android 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.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into two parts, excluding front and back matter. The first part is a list of common, platform-agnostic tasks, like writing a file to local storage or creating an HTTP request. The second part walks you through creating a bare-bones app in each platform, utilizing the techniques from Part I.

mobile, programming, development, iOS, android

Who this book is for

This book is for any native programmer working either exclusively with a single mobile platform or with both, or familiar with one but needing to have some ability with the other. We assume at least a passing familiarity with some programming language.

You don’t have to be an expert with Android Java or iOS Swift, but having some UI programming background is helpful. You may need to refer to official documentation for Objective-C, Swift, Java, or Kotlin to understand some basic language mechanics referenced within this book.

Programmers coming from one framework (iOS-native development or Android-native development) should have an especially easy time consuming the information provided because almost all code examples are presented with functional equivalence in the complimentary framework (Android for iOS, and vice versa).

Since all Android code examples are provided in both Android Java and Android Kotlin, this book has a pleasant side effect of allowing Android developers the same type of cross-reference between Java and Kotlin as cross-platform developers enjoy between iOS and AOSP.

The code samples are not pseudo-code; they are written in the suggested languages and should all compile and function as described.

About the Authors

Shaun Lewis is Mobile Engineering Manager and former Lead Software Engineer for iOS at O’Reilly Media. The first book he read, How to Build a Website in a Weekend, transformed his life at the age of 15. He has over 12 years of professional experience and started developing iPhone apps when iOS was still called iPhone OS. He has worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies and occasionally speaks at events about Apple product development. Shaun lives in Ohio with his wife, two kids, and a drawer full of old smartphones.

Mike Dunn is the Principal Mobile Engineer at O’Reilly Media, a recognized member of the AOSP community, and a dedicated contributor to the Android open source ecosystem, including the popular tiling image library, TileView. He’s contributed to Google’s Closure library, and provided extensions for Google’s next-gen Android media player, ExoPlayer. Mike has been programming professionally for about 15 years, and is continuing to study computer science in the master's program at Georgia Institute of Technology