iOS Development Research Articles

Designing Scalable and Secure Mobile Applications: Lessons from Enterprise-Level iOS Development

Designing Scalable and Secure Mobile Applications: Lessons from Enterprise-Level iOS Development

Автоматизація процесу створення нових цілей у XCODE проєкті

We live in the era of the Internet and technology. Now it is important for a person to be able to do their routine, uninteresting things quickly, and to be able to focus on more professional things. Everyone wants to minimize the time spent searching for information and have all services in one place. Due to these desires, significant progress is being made in the development of mobile applications. A number of factors also contribute to this. First, the development of the hardware of pocket-sized devices reaches a level sufficient for complex computing tasks. Secondly, the speed of Internet communication has increased. Third, almost everyone in the world now has a smartphone, so it is much more profitable for businesses to develop mobile applications to reach a wider audience. The development of applications for mobile devices is becoming more and more popular, but at the same time more expensive. In some cases, a business needs to have a number of similar applications for one reason or another. There are several approaches to code reuse in the context of iOS development. One is to use a common codebase and separate Xcode targets for each product. The process of creating a new target requires a number of routine operations, which require the programmer’s time, and writing code is potentially error-prone. This research proposes to improve this approach by using scripts to generate a project file based on given configurations. A console script for generating a project file and a project to illustrate the approach have been developed.

Comparative Analysis between Flutter and React Native

Today’s well know technology is mobile applications and mobile application development depends on demand skills after the invention of smartphones. The current mobile market shares are divided into two powerful technologies giant Android and iPhone. The Native Android mobile applications development Java-Kotlin are used, and on the other hand, for iPhone Apps are used Swift and Objective-C native IOS development. Those applications of Android and iPhone increased the development process and cost the development cost. Recently, cross-platform proved that developers quickly develop Android and iPhone applications with the same code known as a cross-platform mobile application, reducing company and customer effort and cost. In this research paper, the performance is compared between React Native Vs Flutter and efficiency, effectiveness, compatibility, community growth, documentation, Architecture, developer productivity, and Testing Automation Support CI/CD Support.

How to Grasp the Key Links of PBL Teaching Reform in iOS Curriculum System

The School of Software of Northeastern University actively promotes PBL classroom teaching reform, which requires 
 that classroom teaching content can not only enable students to fully understand and master the mainstream cutting-edge science 
 and technology in today’s market, but also that the whole classroom teaching process can fully stimulate students’ interest in 
 learning and improve their active learning ability, better guide students to expand their knowledge outside the curriculum, and 
 improve their overall professional comprehensive quality. Firstly, this paper analyzes the outstanding problems in the current 
 classroom teaching that affect students’ learning effect and can’t improve students’ hands-on ability, and thinks about the concrete 
 practical thinking of implementing PBL teaching reform in the key links of iOS curriculum system. Combined with the actual 
 situation of undergraduate teaching in Software College of Northeastern University, it puts forward ways and methods to solve 
 many problems, including introducing massive open online course resources. Finally, the paper discusses the teaching reform and 
 its effect of an undergraduate course-”iOS Development Technology”, which the author has undertaken, proves that the proposed 
 reform measures are effective, and makes some prospects for the future teaching improvement.

Comparative Analysis of Native and Cross-Platform iOS Application Development

Abstract Nowadays, mobile applications are developed for more and more areas, providing great help for our everyday lives. When designing a mobile application, the first important decision to make is to choose the targeted platform. Is it only phone or tablet as well? Should the app run on Android or iOS, or should it be available on both mobile operating systems? In the latter case, besides the native development environments, it is worth considering a cross-platform development environment to write the software. This study investigates both the development and performance aspects of some possibilities for iOS application development, namely, native iOS development in Xcode, Xamarin.iOS, and Xamarin.Forms frameworks.

Augmented reality based gesture detection & object creation system using XCode & ARKit

In this modern era of mobile applications, Augmented Reality (AR) is becoming one of the emerging areas of implementation for researchers around the globe. While live gesture detection and 3D model creation still need more attention from researchers. In this paper, we present an interactive AR character that directly interacts with real objects. The interactive AR character automatically determines how to behave and to control real objects. This current research presents three studies that test the social psychological effects of Augmented Reality. In this research, we are using Apple’s IDE for native iOS development on swift, XCode for UI design and architectural functionalities of our application. We used the ARKIT library to import all the necessary functions and classes to manipulate and use according to our needs. Finally, we successfully deployed an IOS application which can detect live gestures of our hand movements and then create 3D models with the help of our hand gestures.

The Pransky interview: Dr James Kuffner, CEO at Toyota Research Institute Advanced Development, Coinventor of the rapidly, exploring random tree algorithm

PurposeThe following article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD-turned entrepreneur regarding his pioneering efforts of bringing technological inventions to market. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe interviewee is Dr James Kuffner, CEO at Toyota Research Institute Advanced Development (TRI-AD). Kuffner is a proven entrepreneur and inventor in robot and motion planning and cloud robotics. In this interview, Kuffner shares his personal and professional journey from conceptualization to commercial realization.FindingsDr Kuffner received BS, MS and PhD degrees from the Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory. He was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo where he worked on software and planning algorithms for humanoid robots. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2002 where he served until March 2018. Kuffner was a Research Scientist and Engineering Director at Google from 2009 to 2016. In January 2016, he joined TRI where he was appointed the Chief Technology Officer and Area Lead, Cloud Intelligence and is presently an Executive Advisor. He has been CEO of TRI-AD since April of 2018.Originality/valueDr Kuffner is perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the rapidly exploring random tree (RRT) algorithm, which has become a key standard benchmark for robot motion planning. He is also known for introducing the term “Cloud Robotics” in 2010 to describe how network-connected robots could take advantage of distributed computation and data stored in the cloud. Kuffner was part of the initial engineering team that built Google’s self-driving car. He was appointed Head of Google’s Robotics Division in 2014, which he co-founded with Andy Rubin to help realize the original Cloud Robotics concept. Kuffner also co-founded Motion Factory, where he was the Senior Software Engineer and a member of the engineering team to develop C++ based authoring tools for high-level graphic animation and interactive multimedia content. Motion Factory was acquired by SoftImage in 2000. In May 2007, Kuffner founded, and became the Director of Robot Autonomy where he coordinated research and software consulting for industrial and consumer robotics applications. In 2008, he assisted in the iOS development of Jibbigo, the first on-phone, real-time speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis application for the iPhone. Jibbigo was acquired by Facebook in 2013. Kuffner is one of the most highly cited authors in the field of robotics and motion planning, with over 15,000 citations. He has published over 125 technical papers and was issued more than 50 patents related to robotics and computer vision technology.

Toward Empirically Investigating Non-Functional Requirements of iOS Developers on Stack Overflow

Context: Mobile application developers are getting more concerned due to the importance of quality requirements or non-functional requirements (NFR) in software quality. Developers around the globe are actively asking a question(s) and sharing solutions to the problems related to software development on Stack Overflow (SO). The knowledge shared by developers on SO contains useful information related to software development such as feature requests (functional/non-functional), code snippets, reporting bugs or sentiments. Extracting the NFRs shared by iOS developers on programming Q&A website SO has become a challenge and a less researched area. Objective: To identify and understand the real problems, needs, trends, and the critical NFRs or quality requirements discussed on Stack Overflow related to iOS mobile application development. Method: We extracted and used only the iOS posts data of SO. We applied the well-known statistical topical model Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify the main topics in iOS posts on SO. Then, we labeled the extracted topics with quality requirements or NFRs by using the wordlists to assess the trend, evolution, hot and unresolved NFRs in all iOS discussions. Results: Our findings revealed that the highly frequent topics the iOS developers discussed are related to usability, reliability, and functionality followed by efficiency. Interestingly, the most problematic areas unresolved are also usability, reliability, and functionality though followed by portability. Besides, the evolution trend of each of the six different quality requirements or NFRs over time is depicted through comprehensive visualization. Conclusion: Our first empirical investigation on approximately 1.5 million iOS posts and comments of SO gives insight on comprehending the NFRs in iOS application development through the lens of real-world practitioners.

Competing Across Platforms: Antecedents of Platform Mobility

Competition at the platform-level coevolves with that at the complementor level –while complementors’ cross-platform mobility affects platform level success, the uncertainty surrounding the emergence of the dominant platform also affects complementors’ mobility decisions. In this study, we investigate the impact of the installed-base gap between Android and iOS on app developers’ decisions to move across platforms. We argue that Apple’s iOS pursues a more quality-driven strategy, and thus as Android catches up with iOS in terms of growing installed bases (of both hardware and software), there are uncertainties regarding which of the two will become the dominant platform. As the market evolves, however, it becomes clear that iOS can sustain its competitive advantages despite the smaller market share. We find the increasing gap between installed bases of Android and iOS has an inverted-U effect on iOS developers’ likelihood of moving to Android. Moreover, low performers and younger app-developers on iOS are more sensitive to such uncertainties and thus have been the primary contributors to the inverted-U shaped mobility pattern. In contrast, mobility from the Android to the iOS market does not show the same or an opposite pattern. Superior performance is more important for developers moving from Android to iOS (than the other direction of developers moving from iOS to Android). This is because mobility from the quantity-driven platform (Android) to the quality-driven one (iOS) is mainly motivated by the desire to target at a more lucrative, though more demanding, platform market, thus needs to be facilitated by higher performance.

Platform privacies: Governance, collaboration, and the different meanings of “privacy” in iOS and Android development

Mobile application design can have a tremendous impact on consumer privacy. But how do mobile developers learn what constitutes privacy? We analyze discussions about privacy on two major developer forums: one for iOS and one for Android. We find that the different platforms produce markedly different definitions of privacy. For iOS developers, Apple is a gatekeeper, controlling market access. The meaning of “privacy” shifts as developers try to interpret Apple’s policy guidance. For Android developers, Google is one data-collecting adversary among many. Privacy becomes a set of defensive features through which developers respond to a data-driven economy’s unequal distribution of power. By focusing on the development cultures arising from each platform, we highlight the power differentials inherent in “privacy by design” approaches, illustrating the role of platforms not only as intermediaries for privacy-sensitive content but also as regulators who help define what privacy is and how it works.

Impact of Mergers and Acquisitions on Segment Entry: An Empirical Study of the Mobile App Market

There is an ongoing debate in the mergers and acquisitions literature centered on whether mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have positive or negative effects on competition and market entry outcomes. While the dominant view suggests that mergers and acquisitions exert positive influence on the merging firms and their rivals (for instance, in terms of positive abnormal returns), an opposing view grounded in the anti-trust perspective argues that M&As deter competition and future market entry. However, empirical evidence on whether M&As facilitate or deter competition within an industry is very limited. In this research, we attempt to provide empirical evidence to inform this debate by studying the impact of M&As on a specific competitive outcome - app developers’ segment-entry decisions in the mobile app market. Based on data covering the entire population of iOS developers during the period between 2008 and 2015, we find that the number of M&As in a specific segment has negative impact on app developers’ subsequent segment entries. Further, the entry-deterring effect of M&As is (a) stronger for iOS-platform incumbents than for iOS-platform new entrants, and (b) stronger for the deals conducted by large acquirers. These empirical findings are aligned with an anti-trust perspective in that the competition-deterring effects of M&As indicate their “dark side.”

Windows Based Graphical Objective C IDE

On the growing demand of mobile application development, the learning and knowledge of the basic languages used in the development becomes a necessity. For the Android development, we need the basics of Java technology, for Windows phone application, the Dot Net and C# technology is promoted and for iOS development, the basics of Objective C is the main prerequisite. For most of the Windows based system users, it becomes difficult to practice the Objective C programs, since Windows provide no specific tool for it. Based upon this issue, by learning and doing a tremendous research on the working of different available Objective C IDEs and the methodologies used by them, we have come up with a Windows based User-friendly Objective C IDE that provides a cross platform advantage with graphical features.

Joining a smartphone ecosystem: Application developers’ motivations and decision criteria

ContextThe ecosystems surrounding current smartphones operating systems, especially the application markets, provide significant value for customers and therefore possibilities for provider differentiation. Why do independent application developers and innovators join these ecosystems, and which factors influence their choice between different platform options? ObjectiveThis paper evaluates why innovators publish applications for smartphone operating systems, and which factors influence their choice between the two most common platforms, Android and Apple iOS, and leading them to join this respective ecosystem. MethodA quantitative questionnaire containing questions related to demographics, motivational factors, factors impacting choice of platform and application publishing history. 113 Application developers from all over the world responded, relatively evenly split between the two operating systems. ResultsThe main motivations are the experience of fun and intellectual stimulation during the process itself and learning of new skills or know-how. Financial gain, on the other hand, was found to be of less importance. There are also significant differences between the developers according to their preferred platform, e.g. iOS developers are more often motivated by financial gain. In choosing which ecosystem to join, network size, openness and entry barriers play major roles, and according to these criteria the two ecosystems are perceived to be significantly different. In addition, the toolkit quality is one of the most important factors for developers, but not a point of differentiation between the two ecosystems. ConclusionThis paper complements prior research with the viewpoint of the developers themselves, focusing on how they perceive both technical and economic, as well as governance related aspects. In addition, most research so far has focused on one aspect only, mostly application markets, while this study assess the perception of the whole ecosystem, including end user device, markets and OS. It is concluded that the motivations and perceptions of developers comprise a major component in the creation and management of a large and diverse ecosystem, and that there exists a significant group of user innovators, who are not motivated by financial gain. There are several other aspects besides network size that drive the choice of platform. In addition, developers perceive hardware, software, marketplaces and other aspects as one single construct. Any platform owner therefore has to carefully consider and manage their expectations and perceptions.