Tech News - Mobile

Last week, the React team announced the release of React Native 0.61. This release comes with an overhauled reloading feature called Fast Refresh, a new hook named ‘useWindowDimensions’, and more. https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1176597851822010375 Key updates in React Native 0.61 Fast Refresh for reliable hot reloading In December last year, the React Native team asked developers what they dislike about React Native. Developers listed the problems they face when creating a React Native application including clunky debugging, improved open-source contribution process, and more. Hot reloading refreshes the updated files without losing the app state. Previously, it did not work reliably with function components, often failed to update the screen, and wasn’t resilient to typos and mistakes, which was one of the major pain points. To address this issue, React Native 0.61 introduces Fast Refresh, which is a combination of live reloading with hot reloading. Dan Abramov, a core React Native developer, wrote in the announcement, “In React Native 0.61, we’re unifying the existing “live reloading” (reload on save) and “hot reloading” features into a single new feature called “Fast Refresh”.” Fast Refresh fully supports function components, hooks, recovers gracefully after typos and mistakes, and does not perform invasive code transformations. It is enabled by default, however, you can turn it off in the Dev Menu. The useWindowDimensions hook React Native 0.61 comes with a new hook called useWindowDimensions, which can be used as an alternative to the Dimensions API in most cases. This will automatically provide and subscribe to window dimension updates. Read also: React Conf 2018 highlights: Hooks, Concurrent React, and more Improved CocoaPods compatibility support is fixed In React Native 0.60, CocoaPods was integrated by default, which ended up breaking builds that used the use_frameworks! attribute. In React Native 0.61, this issue is fixed by making some updates in podspec, which describes a version of a Pod library. Read also: React Native development tools: Expo, React Native CLI, CocoaPods [Tutorial] Check out the official announcement to know more about React Native 0.61. 5 pitfalls of React Hooks you should avoid – Kent C. Dodds #Reactgate forces React leaders to confront community’s toxic culture head on Ionic React RC is now out! React Native VS Xamarin: Which is the better cross-platform mobile development framework? React Native community announce March updates, post sharing the roadmap for Q4

If Vue.js is the Javascript framework of your choice, you will definitely enjoy Vue Native. Developed by Geeky Ants, Vue Native can help you build powerful native mobile apps using JavaScript and Vue.js. It is designed to connect React Native and Vue.js, making app development simpler. It has gained quite some popularity with already 2500+ starts on Github, since its official announcement, a few days ago. It was originally started by SmallComfort as react-vue which transpiles Vue files to React & React Native Components. GeekyAnts forked it later. It brings the goodness of Vue ecosystem to native mobile app development such as support for templating, styling, state-management with Vuex and router makes. More distinctive features include declarative rendering, two-way binding, and completeness of React Native ecosystem. How does it work Vue Native transpiles to React Native. React Native is a framework to build native Android and iOS apps using JavaScript. The Vue Native CLI is used to generate a Vue Native app, which is a React Native API wrapper. It generates a simple single page application (SPA) using create-react-native-app and vue-native-core. React Native is a direct dependency of Vue Native. Once you initialize a new app using vue-native-cli, the entry script is App.vue. You can use: the reactivity system of Vue to observe React component the react-vue-loader to run Vue component in React application the vue-native-scripts to run Vue component in React Native How to get started The first step is to install React Native on your system. Next, install the Vue Native CLI on your system using npm. $ npm install -g vue-native-cli Now all you need to do is initialize a new Vue-Native project directory in your system. You can now run this app on an iOS or Android Simulator using the npm run command. The installation guide contains the full list of features along with details to get started and code examples. Vue Native is open source; you can find it on GitHub. Why has Vue.js become so popular? Vue.js developer special: What we learnt from VUECONF.US 2018 Testing Single Page Applications (SPAs) using Vue.js developer tools

Yesterday, the team behind React Native announced the release of React Native 0.60. This release brings accessibility improvements, a new app screen, AndroidX support, CocoaPods in iOS by default, and more. Following are some of the updates introduced in React Native 0.60: Accessibility improvements This release ships with several improvements to accessibility APIs both on Android and iOS. As the new features directly use APIs provided by the underlying platform, they’ll easily integrate with native assistance technologies. Here are some of the accessibility updates to React Native 0.60: A number of missing roles have been added for various components. There’s a new Accessibility States API for better web support in the future. AccessibilityInfo.announceForAccessibility is now supported on Android. Extended accessibility actions will now include callbacks that deal with accessibility around user-defined actions. iOS accessibility flags and reduce motion are now supported on iOS. A clickable prop and an onClick callback are added for invoking actions via keyboard navigation. A new start screen React Native 0.60 comes with a new app screen, which is more user-friendly. It shows useful instructions like editing App.js, links to the documentation, how you can start the debug menu, and also aligns with the upcoming website redesign. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImlAqMZxveg CocoaPods are now part of React Native's iOS project React Native for iOS now comes with CocoaPods by default, which is an application level dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects. Developers are recommended to open the iOS platform code using the ‘xcworkspace’ file from now on. Additionally, the Pod specifications for the internal packages have been updated to make them compatible with the Xcode projects, which will help with troubleshooting and debugging. Lean Core removals In order to bring the React Native repository to a manageable state, the team started the Lean Core project. As a part of this project, they have extracted WebView and NetInfo into separate repositories. With React Native 0.60, the team has finished migrating them out of the React Native repository. Geolocation has also been extracted based on the community feedback about the new App Store policy. Autolinking for iOS and Android React Native libraries often consist of platform-specific or native code. The autolinking mechanism enables your project to discover and use this code. With this release, the React Native CLI team has made major improvements to autolinking. Developers using React Native before version 0.60, are advised to unlink native dependencies from a previous install. Support for AndroidX (Breaking change) With this release, React Native has been migrated to AndroidX (Android Extension library). As this is a breaking change, developers need to migrate all their native code and dependencies as well. The React Native community has come up with a temporary solution for this called “jetifier”, an AndroidX transition tool in npm format, with a react-native compatible style. Many users are excited about the release and considered it to be the biggest RN release. https://twitter.com/cipriancaba/status/1146411606076792833 Other developers shared some tips for migrating to AndroidX, which is an open source project that maps the original support library API packages into the androidx namespace. We can’t use both AndroidX and the old support library together, which means “you are either all in or not in at all.” Here’s a piece of good advice shared by a developer on Reddit: “Whilst you may be holding off on 0.60.0 until whatever dependency you need supports X you still need to make sure you have your dependency declarations pinned down good and proper, as dependencies around the react native world start switching over if you automatically grab a version with X when you are not ready your going to get fun errors when building, of course this should be a breaking change worthy of a major version number bump but you never know. Much safer to keep your versions pinned and have a googlePlayServicesVersion in your buildscript (and only use libraries that obey it).” Considering this release has major breaking changes, others are also suggesting to wait for some time till 0.60.2 comes out. “After doing a few major updates, I would suggest waiting for this update to cool down. This has a lot of breaking changes, so I would wait for at least 0.60.2 to be sure that all the major requirements for third-party apps are fulfilled ( AndroidX changes),” a developer commented on Reddit. Along with these exciting updates, the team and community have introduced a new tool named Upgrade Helper to make the upgrade process easier. To know more in detail check out the official announcement. React Native VS Xamarin: Which is the better cross-platform mobile development framework? Keeping animations running at 60 FPS in a React Native app [Tutorial] React Native development tools: Expo, React Native CLI, CocoaPods [Tutorial]  

Google has just open-sourced Filament, their physically based rendering (PBR) engine for Android. It can also be used in Windows, Linux, and macOS. Filament provides a set of tools and APIs for Android developers to help them easily create high-quality 2D and 3D rendering. Filament is currently being used in the Sceneform library both at runtime on Android devices and as the renderer inside the Android Studio plugin. Apart from Filament, Google has also open sourced Materials, the full reference documentation for their material system. They have also made available Material Properties which is a reference sheet for the standard material model. Google’s Filament comes packed with the following features: The rendering system is able to perform efficiently on mobile platforms. The primary target is OpenGL ES 3.x class GPUs. The rendering system emphasizes overall picture quality. Artists are able to iterate often and quickly on their assets and the rendering system allows them to do so instinctively. The physically based approach of the system also allows developers to create visually believable materials even if they don’t understand the theory behind the implementation. The system relies on as few parameters as possible to reduce trial and error and allows users to quickly master the material model. The system uses physical units everywhere possible: distances in meters or centimeters, color temperatures in Kelvin, light units in lumens or candelas, etc. The rendering library is as small as possible so any application can bundle it without increasing the binary to unwanted sizes. Filament APIs There are two major APIs used. Native C++ API for Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows Java/JNI API for Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows Backends OpenGL 4.1+ for Linux, macOS, and Windows OpenGL ES 3.0+ for Android Vulkan 1.0 for Android, Linux, macOS (with MoltenVk) and Windows A sample material rendered with Filament. Source: Github You can check out the Filament Documentation, for an in-depth explanation of real-time PBR, the graphics capabilities and implementation of Filament. Google open sources Seurat to bring high precision graphics to Mobile VR Google releases Android Things library for Google Cloud IoT Core Google updates biometric authentication for Android P, introduces BiometricPrompt API

For a powerful, high quality mobile device experience, Google recently rolled out the Go edition of its AI packed Android 9.0 Pie version. The Go edition comes with additional storage of upto 500 MB, faster boot time, better security and more improvements for entry level phones. Source: Google Blog page Added Google Go features: A first time smartphone user will be able to experience a fully redesigned set of Google apps with the Go edition. Let us look at each in detail: Google Go will read aloud your webpages and highlight each word so you can follow along. YouTube Go will let you download videos and save it as in the Gallery mode using less data. Maps Go features navigation, making it possible for people with Go edition devices or unstable connections to use turn-by-turn directions whether you’re traveling by car, by bus, or on foot. Files Go, which has saved users ~90TB of space since launch, is now capable of transferring data peer-to-peer, without using mobile data, at speeds up to ~490Mbips. Assistant Go supports additional languages including Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Indonesian. It has expanded support for device actions like controlling Bluetooth, camera, flashlight and added reminders. Android Messages App for Android (Go edition) is now ~50 percent smaller in size and the Phone App includes caller ID and spam detection. "We welcomed our first wave of Android (Go edition) phones this April, and now there are more than 200 devices available in 120+ countries including India, South Africa, US, Nigeria and Brazil." says Sagar Kamdar, Director of Product Management, Google. Devices that participated in the P Beta programme include Sony Mobile, Xiaomi, HMD Global, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and all other qualifying Android One devices. To read the full coverage of the Go edition, visit the official Google blog page. Introducing Android 9 Pie, filled with machine learning and baked-in UI features Android 9 pie’s Smart Linkify: How Android’s new machine learning based feature works All new Android apps on Google Play must target API Level 26 (Android Oreo) or higher, to publish

On Tuesday, Android Police reported that Google Podcasts is automatically transcribing episodes. It is using these transcripts as metadata to help users find the podcasts they want to listen even if they don’t know its title or when it was published. Though this is coming into light now, Google’s plan of using transcripts for improving search results has already been shared even before the app was actually launched. In an interview with Pacific Content, Zack Reneau-Wedeen, Google Podcasts product manager, said that Google could “transcribe the podcast and use that to understand more details about the podcast, including when they are discussing different topics in the episode.” This is not a user-facing feature but instead works in the background. You can see the transcription of these podcasts in the web page source of the Google Podcasts web portal. After getting a hint from a user, Android Police searched for “Corbin dabbing port” instead of Corbin Davenport, a writer for Android Police. Sure enough, the app’s search engine showed Episode 312 of the Android Police Podcast, his podcast, as the top result: Source: Android Police The transcription is enabled by Google’s Cloud Speech-to-Text transcription technology. Using transcriptions of such a huge number of podcasts Google can do things like including timestamps, index the contents, and make text easily searchable. This will also allow Google to actually “understand” what is being discussed in the podcasts without having to solely rely on the not-so-detailed notes and descriptions given by the podcasters. This could prove to be quite helpful if users don’t remember much about the shows other than a quote or interesting subject matter and make searching frictionless. As a user-facing feature, this could be beneficial for both a listener and a creator. “It would be great if they would surface this as feature/benefit to both the creator and the listener. It would be amazing to be able to timestamp, tag, clip, collect and share all the amazing moments I've found in podcasts over the years, “ said a Twitter user. Read the full story on Android Police. Google announces the general availability of AMP for email, faces serious backlash from users European Union fined Google 1.49 billion euros for antitrust violations in online advertising Google announces Stadia, a cloud-based game streaming service, at GDC 2019

On Saturday, the Flutter team announced that, as a competition to Electron, they will soon be releasing native desktop client to accelerate mobile development. Flutter native desktop client will come with support for resizing the emulator during runtime, using assets from PC, better RAM usage, and more. Flutter is Google’s open source mobile app SDK, which enables developers to write once and deploy natively on different platforms such as Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux. Additionally, they can also share the business logic to the web using AngularDart. Here’s what Flutter for desktop brings in: Resizable emulator during runtime To check how your layout looks on different screen sizes you need to create different emulators, which is quite cumbersome. To solve this issue Flutter desktop client will provide resizable emulator. Use assets saved on your PC When working with apps that interact with assets on the phone, developers have to first move all the testing files to the emulator or the device. With this desktop client, you can simply pick the file you want with your native file picker. Additionally, you don’t have to make any changes to the code as the desktop implementation uses the same method as the mobile implementation. Hot reloads and debugging Hot reload and debugging allows quickly experimenting, building UIs, adding new features, and fixing bugs. The desktop client supports these capabilities for better productivity. Better RAM usage The Android emulator consumes up to 1 GM RAM, but the RAM usage becomes worse when you are running the IntelliJ and the ever-RAM-hungry Chrome. Since the embedder is running natively, there will be no need for Android. Universally usable widgets You will be able to universally use most of the widgets such as buttons, loading indicators, etc that you create. And those widgets that require a different look as per the platform can be encapsulated pretty easily but checking the TargetPlatfrom property. Pages and plugins Pages differ in layout, depending on the platform and screen sizes, but not in functionality. You will be able to easily create accurate layouts for each platform with PageLayoutWidget. With regards to plugins, you do not have to make any changes in the Flutter code when using a plugin that also supports the desktop embedder. The Flutter desktop client is still in alpha, which means there will be more changes in the future. Read the official announcement on Medium. Google Flutter moves out of beta with release preview 1 Google Dart 2.1 released with improved performance and usability JavaScript mobile frameworks comparison: React Native vs Ionic vs NativeScript

Nativescript version 4.1 has been released with multiple performance improvements and major highlights such as support for Angular 6, faster app launch time, new UI scenarios and much more. Android 6 support NativeScript 4.1 Angular integration has been updated with support for Angular 6. And since Angular 6 requires webpack 4, developers have to update to nativescript-dev-webpack 0.12.0 as well. V8 engine now available in v6.6 The V8 Engine is now upgraded to version 6.6. The new engine adds major performance boost, JavaScript language features, code caching after execution, removal of AST numbering, and multiple asynchronous performance improvements. Faster Android startup time The upgrade to V8 6.6 and webpack 4, also brings faster app launch time on Android making it on par with iOS. Depending on the device and the specific app, Android app startup time is now between 800ms on high-end devices, to 1.8s on older devices. This is an improvement of almost 50% compared to the startup time in Nativescript v4.0! Improvements to user interfaces Nativescript 4.1 adds augmented reality with support for ARKit for iOS by adding the built-in vector type. Multiple iOS Simulators Nativescript 4.1, can now run applications simultaneously on multiple iOS Simulators, iOS devices, Android emulators, and Android devices. Developers can LiveSync change on iPhone X, iPhone 8, iPad 2, etc. and immediately see how the application looks and behaves on all of them. Navigation in a Modal View There are updates to navigation in modal view as well. Before version 4.1, for navigation inside a modal view, you had to remove the implicit wrapper and specify the root element of the modal view. With the new changes, the first element of the modal view becomes its root view and developers can place a page router outlet there, for proper navigation. LayoutChanged Event Nativescript 4.1 introduces layoutChanged event that will be fired when the layout bounds of a view changes due to layout processing. The correct view sizes are obtained with getActualSize(). Proper view sizes are especially useful when dealing with size-dependent animations. The full list of bug updates and other fixes are available in the changelog. You can read more about the release on the Nativescript blog. NativeScript: What is it, and how to set it up How to integrate Firebase with NativeScript for cross-platform app development

Just a month after Homebrew 1.9.0 was released, Homebrew 2.0.0 was released last week with official support for Linux and Windows 10 (with Windows Subsystem for Linux), an automatic running of brew cleanup, removal of support for OS X Mountain Lion ( for versions10.8 and below), and much more. Features of Homebrew 2.0.0 Homebrew now offers official support for Linux and Windows 10 with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). brew cleanup runs periodically (every 30 days) and is triggered automatically for individual formula cleanup on reinstall, install or upgrade. Homebrew has dropped its support for OS X Mountain Lion (10.8 and below). With this new version, Homebrew will now offer better performance, as its portable Ruby is now built on OS X Mavericks (10.9). Debugging git issues is now easier as brew update-reset resets all repositories and taps to their upstream versions. Homebrew reduces errors when formulae are built from source and also allows the removal of many workarounds for niche issues by filtering all user environment variables. The team is now attempting to migrate away from Jenkins to a suitable hosted CI provider after a security researcher, Eric Holmes,  identified a GitHub personal access token leak from Homebrew’s Jenkins in 2018. Homebrew Cask’s downloads are quarantined to provide the same level of security while manually downloading these tools. Homebrew uses a proper option parser so as to generate the man brew and --help. Users can now expect better feedback on inputting invalid options to formulae or commands. Thus making argument handling more simple and robust. To know about the other features in detail, head over to Hombrew’s official page. Conda 4.6.0 released with support for more shells, better interoperability among others Mozilla releases Firefox 65 with support for AV1, enhanced tracking protection, and more! Typescript 3.3 is finally released!  

Last week, the team behind Flutter made an announcement at Google Developer Days about the stable release of Flutter 1.9. Flutter 1.9 has received more than 1,500 PRs (Pull Requests) from more than 100 contributors. It comes with support for macOS Catalina and iOS 13, improved tooling support, new Dart language features, new Material widgets and much more. The team also announced the successful integration of Flutter’s web support into the main Flutter repository that will allow developers to write for desktop, mobile as well as web with the same codebase. Tencent, the well-known internet brand also uses Flutter in their mobile apps. https://twitter.com/Appinventiv/status/1171689785733173248 https://twitter.com/ZoeyFan723/status/1171566234892210176   What’s new in Flutter 1.9 Support for macOS Catalina and iOS 13 Since Apple is planning to release Catalina, the latest version of macOS, the team  at Flutter has updated the end-to-end tooling experience so that it works properly with Catalina and Xcode 11. Support has been added for the new Xcode build system that enables 64-bit support throughout the toolchain and simplifies platform dependencies. This release also includes an implementation of the iOS 13 draggable toolbar, along with support for vibration feedback, long-press and drag-from-right. The team is also working on iOS dark mode that has a number of pull requests already merged. Flutter users can now turn on experimental support for Bitcode that is Apple’s platform-independent intermediate representation of a compiled program. Material components in Flutter 1.9 The Material design components and features have been updated in Flutter 1.9. This release comes with new widgets that include ToggleButtons and ColorFiltered. Dart 2.5  As a part of the Flutter 1.9 release, the team is also releasing Dart 2.5 that includes support for pre-release of Foreign Function Interface (FFI). New projects default to Swift and Kotlin in Flutter 1.9 With this release, new projects default to Swift and Kotlin instead of Objective-C and Java for iOS and Android respectively. Since a lot of packages are written in Swift, making it as a default language would remove the manual work for adding those packages. Flutter on the web The team also announced that the flutter_web repository has been deprecated and web support has been merged into the main flutter repository. It seems users are quite excited about this news. https://twitter.com/max_myracle/status/1171530782340304899 https://twitter.com/annnoo96/status/1171442355875938304 To know more about this news, check out the official post. Other interesting news in mobile Apple Music is now available on your web browser Android 10 releases with gesture navigation, dark theme, smart reply, live captioning, privacy improvements and updates to security Is Apple’s ‘Independent Repair Provider Program’ a bid to avoid the ‘Right To Repair’ bill?  

Yesterday was a big day for Apple. Apple’s September event featured a number of new replacements of Apple’s already popular products including the new iPhone 11 (with triple cameras), Watch Series 5, Apple TV+ and a new iPad. In case you missed seeing the live update, we’ve got you covered with everything Apple announced at the Apple event for September 2019. Apple is releasing iOS 13 on September 19 as a software update for iPhone 6s models and later. Apple also said additional features will be available on September 30 with iOS 13.1, including improvements to AirDrop. iPhone 11 succeeds iPhone XR;  iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max comes with triple cameras No doubt the most anticipated launch of the event, iPhone 11 was portrayed as the successor of iPhone XR. iPhone 11 comes with iOS 13 integration and two high-definition cameras and Night mode for photos. The dual-camera system lets users easily zoom between each camera while Audio Zoom matches the audio to the video framing for more dynamic sound. Users can easily record videos without switching out of Photo mode with QuickTake by simply holding the shutter button to start recording. It is powered by the A13 Bionic chip with all-day battery life. A12. The A13 Bionic is built for machine learning, with a faster Neural Engine for real-time photo and video analysis, and new Machine Learning Accelerators that allow the CPU to deliver more than 1 trillion operations per second. It has a 6.1-inch all-screen Liquid Retina display. iPhone 11 is water-resistant and comes in six colors including red, black, white, yellow, green and purple. iPhone 11 will get an update for Deep Fusion, coming later this fall, which is a new image processing system enabled by the Neural Engine of A13 Bionic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4p6njjPV_o iPhone 11 will be available for pre-order beginning Friday, September 13 and in stores beginning Friday, September 20, starting at $699 in the US, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and more than 30 other countries and regions. The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max come with a triple-camera system which provides a pro-level camera experience with an Ultra-Wide, Wide and Telephoto camera. The triple-camera system enables Portrait mode with a wider field of view, great for taking portraits of multiple people. The Telephoto camera features a larger ƒ/2.0 aperture to capture 40 percent more light compared to iPhone Xs for better photos and videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVEemOmHw9Y However, not many are impressed with the aesthetics of the camera placement. https://twitter.com/9GAG/status/1171623152562200576 https://twitter.com/lytearr_/status/1171608034105155585 https://twitter.com/shrekpepeboii/status/1171629182901600256 The iPhone 11 Pro has a 5.8-inch OLED, and the Pro Max has a 6.5-inch OLED. They have a Super Retina XDR display, a custom-designed OLED with up to 1,200 nits brightness. It also comes with the A13 Bionic chip with iPhone 11 Pro offering up to four more hours of battery life in a day than iPhone XS, and iPhone 11 Pro Max offering up to five hours more than iPhone XS Max. iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max will be available in 64GB, 256GB and 512GB models in midnight green, space gray, silver, and gold starting at $999 and $1,099, respectively. Apple is also launching a new line of iPhone cases that come in a wide range of colors. Apple Watch Series 5 now works just like… your normal watch The new series of Apple Watch supports looks much like last year’s model, except that it supports the always-on display function. The series 5 dims the brightness, but it retains all of the same visuals you’d normally see while using it. This is different from how most smartwatches turn off the display to extend battery life. Though it has the same 18-hour battery life as the Series 4. You also have international emergency calling for added personal safety. New health features include Cycle Tracking, Noise app, and Activity Trends. The Apple Watch Series 5, has the Compass app to see the heading, incline, latitude, longitude, and current elevation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bvcyIV4yzo In addition, Apple is launching three new health studies: one for women’s health, one for hearing, and one for heart health. It’s partnering with major research institutions on each, and Apple Watch users can enroll through a forthcoming Apple Research app. Apple Watch Series 5 (GPS) starts at $399 and Apple Watch Series 5 (GPS + Cellular) starts at $499. This is the first Apple Watch to release with ceramic and titanium finishes. Sales start beginning Friday, September 20 in the US, Puerto Rico and 20 other countries and regions. You can order it from apple.com and in the Apple Store app. New 7th-Gen iPad now has a 10.2-inch display Apple’s new 7th-gen iPad is now upgraded from standard 9.7-inch display size to 10.2 inches. It also features the A10 Bionic processor and a new Smart Connector. It also provides support for Apple Pencil and the full-size Smart Keyboard. iPad starts at $329 for the Wi-Fi model and $459 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model. Apple Arcade game subscription service Apple’s game subscription service, Apple Arcade will finally launch on September 30 on iPadOS and tvOS 13 and in October on macOS Catalina. The service will initially feature over 100 new, exclusive games, all playable across iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and Apple TV. To give users maximum flexibility when playing, some games will support controllers, including Xbox Wireless Controllers with Bluetooth, PlayStation DualShock 4 and MFi game controllers, in addition to touch controls and Siri Remote. Apple TV+ launches November 1 at $4.99 per month Apple’s flagship all-original video subscription service, Apple TV+ will be available at $4.99 per month, starting November 1.  This puts Apple in direct competition with Disney, whose subscription service Disney+ is available for $7 a month. Apple TV+ will offer a lineup of shows, movies, and documentaries, focusing on original content produced exclusively for the service. Apple will also include a year-long subscription to Apple TV Plus for free if you buy a new Apple product, including new iPads, iPhones, laptops, or desktops. If you are in a hurry here’s a 2 min video of the Apple Event: https://youtu.be/ZA3MV2V--TU Keep checking this space for more Apple coverage More news for Apple Apple Music is now available on your web browser Is Apple’s ‘Independent Repair Provider Program’ a bid to avoid the ‘Right To Repair’ bill Apple announces ‘WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy’ that considers web tracking as a security vulnerability

After releasing Ionic 4.0 in January this year, the Ionic team announced the release of Ionic  4.1 on Wednesday. This release is named “Hydrogen” based on the name of elements in the periodic table. Along with a few bugfixes, Ionic 4.1 comes with features like skeleton text update, indeterminate checkboxes, and more. Some of the new features in Ionic 4.1 Skeleton text update Using the ion-skeleton-text component, developers can now make showing skeleton screens for list items more natural. You can use ‘ion-skeleton-text’ inside media controls like ‘ion-avatar’ and ‘ion-thumbnail’. The size of skeletons placed inside of avatars and thumbnails will be automatically adjusted according to their containers. You can also style the skeletons to have custom border-radius, width, height, or any other CSS styles for use outside of Ionic components. Indeterminate checkboxes A new property named ‘indeterminate’ is now added to the ‘ion-checkbox’ component. When the value of ‘indeterminate’ is true it will show the checkbox in a half-on/half-off state. This property will be handy in cases where you are using a ‘check all’ checkbox, but only some of the options in the group are selected. CSS display utilities Ionic 4.1 comes with a few new CSS classes for hiding elements and responsive design: ion-hide and ion-hide-{breakpoint}-{dir}. To hide an element, you can use the ‘ion-hide’ class. You can use the ion-hide-{breakpoint}-{dir} classes to hide an element based on breakpoints for certain screen sizes. To know more about the other features in detail, visit Ionic's official website. Ionic Framework 4.0 has just been released, now backed by Web Components, not Angular Ionic v4 RC released with improved performance, UI Library distribution and more The Ionic team announces the release of Ionic React Beta  

Multiple Google Pixel phones experienced an automatic activation of the ‘Battery Saver mode’ today when their phone was almost fully charged. Reddit saw a surge of comments on how users were taken by surprise due to the automatic turning on of the Battery Saver mode. The Pixel team responded to these comments clarifying that ‘an internal experiment to test battery saving features was mistakenly rolled out to more users than intended.’. Even though the settings have been reverted back to the default on their end, the amount of control that Google has on a user’s phone without their knowledge is scary. In most devices, the battery saver mode automatically kicks in when the phone’s charge level reaches a certain threshold. Users can change the percentage at which the battery saver activates. Apparently, Google manipulated the percentage for the users remotely. Reddit saw multiple users responding to Google’s claims of the “mistakenly deployed experiment”   Source: Reddit This is not the first time that users have felt a loss of control over Google-operated services. In October 2017, Google locked out users from Google docs for a violation of their TOS. While many users affirmed that their content nowhere violated the TOS, Google responded saying that they “mistakenly blocked access” to some of their users’ files, including Google Docs. This was due to a short-lived bug that incorrectly flagged some files as violating their terms of service (TOS). The bug was soon removed and the team restored affected users access to all affected files. In both these cases, the changes took place without any prior notification to the users. These ‘accidental mistakes’ on Google’s part raises concerns of the level of control Google has over user devices and data that users aren’t yet aware of. Incidentally, AndroidPolice also reported yesterday that android handsets running Pie or a Pie beta (like Pixel models, the Essential Phone, Nokia 7 Plus, and the OnePlus 6) also experienced the Battery saver issue. Bloomberg says Google, Mastercard covertly track customers’ offline retail habits via a secret million dollar ad deal Like newspapers, Google algorithms are protected by the First amendment making them hard to legally regulate them Google slams Trump’s accusations, asserts its search engine algorithms do not favor any political ideology  

Yesterday, the React Native team shared further plans for React Native to provide a better support to its users and collaborators outside of Facebook. The team is planning to open source some of the internal tools and improve the widely used tools in the open source community. In order to ensure no breaking code is open sourced, they are also improving their testing infrastructure. The following are some of the focus areas the developers will be working on: Cleaning up for leaner core The developers are planning on reducing the surface area of React Native by removing non-core and unused components. Currently, React Native is a huge repo, so it makes sense to break it into smaller ones. This will come with many advantages, some of which are: Managing the contributions to React Native will become easier Chance to deprecate older modules Bundle size for projects that don’t use the extractable components will be reduced. This will lead to faster startup times for the apps. Enable faster reviewing of pull requests and merging. Open sourcing internals and improving popular tools They will be open-sourcing some of the tools that Facebook uses internally and provide improved support for tools that are widely used by the open source community. Some of the projects they will be working on are: Open sourcing of JavaScript Interface (JSI), an interface that facilitates the communication between JavaScript and the native language. Support for 64-bit libraries on Android. The new architecture will come with debugging enabled. Support for CocoaPods, Gradle, Maven, and new Xcode build system will be improved. Improved testing infrastructure Before publishing a code, it goes through several tests internally by the React Native engineers. But, since there are a few differences in how React Native is being used at Facebook and by the open-source community, these updates sometimes result in introducing some breaking changes to the React Native surface. To avoid such situations they will be improving internal tests and ensure that new features are tested in an environment as similar to open source as possible. Along with these infrastructure improvements, Facebook will start using React Native via the public API, as the open source community does. This will reduce the unintentional breaking changes. All these changes, along with some more, will be achieved throughout the next year as per the official announcement. They have completed some of the goals at the moment such as JSI, which has already landed in open source. Releasing React Suite 3.4.0 Meanwhile, the React developers announced the release of React Suite 3.4.0. React Suite or RSUITE consists of React component libraries for enterprise system products. This release comes with TypeScript support and few minor bug fixes. The following are some of the updates that are introduced in React Suite 3.4.0: Support is added for TypeScript. renderTooltip is added for Slider. MultiCascader, a single selection of data with hierarchical relationship structure, has been added. Customizing options in <DatePicker> shortcuts were not working properly. This is fixed. The scroll bar not resetting after the column of the <Table> has been fixed. To read React Native’s open source roadmap check out their official announcement. Also, you can read the React Suite’s release notes to know more updates in React Suite 3.4.0. React Conf 2018 highlights: Hooks, Concurrent React, and more React introduces Hooks, a JavaScript function to allow using React without classes React Native 0.57 released with major improvements in accessibility APIs, WKWebView-backed implementation, and more!

Raph Levien, an ex-software engineer at Google’s Fuchsia project, announced yesterday that Fuchsia’s Xi editor is no longer a Google-owned project. It is now being hosted in its own GitHub organization. Xi editor was a Google project to create a performant text editor. All editing operations are asynchronous, so the UI is responsive even when editing huge documents. It is used as the basis for text editing services in the Fuchsia operating system. Raph had started working on the Xi editor at his time in Google, where he had been working for 11 years. The Xi editor is thoroughly async with a loosely coupled design which promises performance and rich extensibility. It’s main aim as stated in the project’s abstract is to “push the state of computer science for text handling and build an open-source community for teaching and learning, and working together to create a joyful editing experience.” After his departure from Google in August, he gave an update yesterday on how that will affect Xi’s development going forward. Per his blog, Xi’s core and its Windows and Mac client projects are now under their own xi-editor organization. They had previously been hosted on Google’s GitHub organization where it was a part of Google’s Contributor License Agreement. As per this agreement, Google can use and distribute a developer’s code without taking away its ownership. The new Xi editor project, licensed under the Apache 2 license, also has a new set of contributor guidelines, which explains in more detail what their process will be going forward. Raph stated in his blog, that since he will be busy with creating a music synthesis game, he is inviting contributors to “help share the load, reviewing each other’s code, discussing desired features and implementation strategies for them, and then assigning issues to me when they need my review.” He further adds, “I’m hopeful this will grow a scalable and sustainable structure for the community.” Regarding the state of the Fuchsia front-end, he mentions that it’s still early days for Fuchsia and the platform is not really ready for end-user software or self-hosted development. “ I’m hopeful it will get there in time and feel that xi-editor will be a great fit for it at that time. I look forward to continuing to collaborate with the Fuchsia team and others within Google.” Read Raph’s announcement on his blog. Google Fuchsia: What’s all the fuss about? Is Google planning to replace Android with Project Fuchsia? Google’s Smart Display – A push towards the new OS, Fuchsia