What are the hot topics in mobile development in 2015?

It has been 8 years since Steve Jobs launched the mobile era in 2007 with the release of the first iPhone. In the past few years, the mobile Internet has developed at an astonishing speed, and the mobile development industry, which has been created from scratch, has also been in rapid evolution. Looking back on the past year, the release of Swift language, Material Design, Win10, etc. is exciting, and the determination of HTML5 standards has rekindled people's enthusiasm for Mobile Web App. For developers, this is the best era. In the new year, we will definitely usher in more exciting changes. What topics will be worth paying attention to in the field of mobile development? This article will throw out some ideas for you to review.

This article will review the platform and technology aspects.

platform

iOS 9

The release of iOS 8 was called "unprecedented". It opened up more than 4,000 APIs, as well as many new features such as App Extensions, HealthKit, HomeKit, etc., adding more possibilities to the expressiveness of iOS Apps. However, such a major update also brought about software quality issues. It is reported that the iOS 9 update, which will be released in the summer of 2015, will not be large and will focus on improving software quality. In addition, at the spring conference that just passed, Apple officially released the Apple Watch, which caused a warm response. It can be said that this year will be the year of smart watches.

For iOS developers, after a period of learning and the gradual consolidation of iOS 8's market share, 2015 will be the year when new features of iOS 8 will be added to applications. In addition, we can foresee that a large number of innovative apps will emerge around HealthKit, Apple Watch, etc., which will also be the hot spots of iOS development in the new year. For Chinese iOS developers, Apple Pay may enter China in 2015, which is conceivable. This will also be another hot spot.

Of course, the most important thing is Swift. Not long ago, Apple released Swift 1.2, which solved many problems that existed before and made the language more perfect. For iOS developers, learning Swift is no longer a question of whether or not to learn it, but when to learn it. Although Swift cannot completely replace Objective-C in a short period of time, due to the good compatibility between the two, we can gradually migrate existing Objective-C apps to Swift. Research on Swift's language features, performance optimization, third-party library development, etc. will also be a hot topic throughout 2015.

Android

The development of Android in 2014 was also quite remarkable. It not only consolidated its position as the market leader, improved its design and performance, but also began to move into the broader Internet of Things. The future of Android is limitless.

For developers, the more significant changes, in addition to the release of Android 5.x and the Material Design language, include the release of the official version of Android Studio 1.0, which marks that Android developers finally have an official IDE, and the use of the accompanying Gradle build tool has become a required course for Android developers. In addition, Android Wear, Android TV, and Android Auto have greatly broadened the scope of Android applications, and developers will have more room to display their talents. In the new year, the Internet of Things and smart hardware, as well as applications based on them, will also set off a wave of enthusiasm among Android developers.

Windows 10

Microsoft has brought us many surprises in the past year, especially for developers. It has changed its conservative and closed attitude and become more open and more friendly to developers. This attitude will undoubtedly help Microsoft win the favor of more developers.

2015 will be a crucial year for Microsoft, as Windows 10, which spans PCs, mobile phones and tablets, will be officially released. Microsoft's success or failure in the mobile field will depend on whether it can win back the hearts of consumers, hardware manufacturers and developers. For developers, developing Universal Apps based on Win10 is an attractive option, because it can support multiple devices at once. It is conceivable that it will become a hot spot for Windows platform development in 2015.

technology

HTML5

On October 29, 2014, the HTML5 standard specification was completed and officially released, which is of great significance to the development of the Web and the mobile Internet. Device API, webSocket, webGL, etc. in HTML5 have greatly expanded the application scope and expressiveness of web apps. On the other hand, iOS 8 has newly added WebKit Framework, and Android 5.0 can update WebView without updating the system. The strong support of giants also makes the future of HTML5 on mobile devices brighter.

However, although HTML5 is gradually approaching native applications in terms of functionality, the interaction and animation performance has always been a bottleneck, making it difficult to achieve the same gorgeousness as native applications without lag. If this problem is solved, the application of HTML5 on mobile devices will be more extensive. Therefore, it is also a hot topic that everyone is paying attention to. The following technologies are dedicated to solving this problem, and I believe they will have greater development in the new year:

Canvas UI: The current problem with Web App is that it is based on DOM, which is very slow. If the page has a lot of content, rendering and interaction will cause lags. In addition, DOM has the defects of single thread and cannot use GPU. Canvas is a tag in HTML5, which outputs content in the form of bitmap, so it can use GPU acceleration. Flipboard recently published an article "60fps On The Mobile Web" that used Canvas to display content to overcome lags. This technology certainly has some limitations, such as poor accessibility of the content on it. But if used properly, Mobile Web App will no longer be synonymous with lags.

Famo.us: This is a JS framework that uses its own JS rendering engine and 3D physics engine to accelerate UI rendering to achieve performance close to that of native applications. It can be easily integrated with Angular.js, backbone, Meteor, React.js, etc. It supports cross-platform and is open source.

HTML5+: This is a technology launched by Dcloud, a domestic company, which includes a complete set of solutions from development to deployment. The most important of these is 5+ Runtime, which includes cross-platform encapsulation of basic HTML5 APIs, Native.js that maps mobile system APIs to JS APIs, and a plug-in system compatible with native SDKs. Using it, you can use JS to call native UIs, which theoretically has only a slight performance loss compared to native application interactions.

NativeScript: This is another technology that uses Javascript to call native UI components and supports existing native Objective-C, Java and .NET libraries. It has been open sourced in March and will release version 1.0 in April.

Cross-platform development

Today, iOS and Android are the two largest players in the mobile market, and this pattern will not change much in the short term. iOS has high-quality users, and Android has a large number of users. For developers, both are markets that are hard to give up. However, developing the same app for two platforms separately is too time-consuming and costly. As HTML5 cannot guarantee the experience for the time being, cross-platform development of "one code, multiple platforms" is imperative.

Hybrid App technology based on PhoneGap/Cordova or similar mobile middleware has gradually matured in the past few years. Recently, Reapp based on React.js technology has emerged, which binds React components to a cross-platform UI-Kit to create Hybrid Apps. It can be expected that Hybrid App will still be a hot development topic in 2015.

Some other cross-platform technologies generate target codes for multiple platforms and finally obtain native apps to solve the experience problem. In this case, the general UI part still needs to be written separately for each platform, while other parts can be shared. Here are some technologies worth noting:

J2OBJC: This is an open source project contributed by Google, which is used to convert Java code to Objective-C. Using it cannot fully achieve code sharing, but practice shows that it can achieve 70% code sharing, which is already very good. With the continued popularity of Swift, I wonder if it will evolve into J2Swift in the new year?

Xamarin: It is a branch of the Mono cross-platform project, which aims to develop multi-platform apps using C# and the .NET framework. Stimulated by the news that Microsoft will open source the core of the .NET framework, Xamarin will surely perform better in 2015.

React Native: This is a cross-platform development technology recently announced by Facebook. It is based on the implementation of React.js on mobile devices and currently supports iOS and Android. It does not emphasize code sharing, but "Learn Once, Write Everywhere". It uses JS to abstract native UI components and provides its own layout system, thus having the flexibility of Web UI and performance close to native UI.

Summarize

Technology is always changing rapidly, and this phenomenon is even more obvious in the mobile industry. In 2015, there will definitely be new mobile development technologies and new hot spots. As a developer, you need to learn to embrace change and master the unchanging skills in the midst of change. I hope that in the new year, everyone can take their technology to a higher level and realize their dreams in the mobile development industry.