Mobile App Development Articles

Engineer working with Android Studio in office

BLE

Mastering Permissions for Bluetooth Low Energy Android

By: Chee Yi Ong

Navigating Android’s ever-evolving permissions landscape can be a daunting task for developers building Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) applications. Over the years, Android OS updates have introduced new permissions, modified existing ones, and changed how developers must approach permissions for BLE-related functionality. Keeping up with these changes can feel like aiming at a moving target, especially when each version of Android…

BLE

iOS 18 AccessorySetupKit: Everything BLE Developers Need To Know

By: Alec Letourneau

Apple’s WWDC 2024 brought exciting advancements for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) developers with the introduction of AccessorySetupKit in iOS 18. This new framework is designed to streamline the discovery and configuration of companion devices,…

BLE

The Ultimate Guide to Android Bluetooth Low Energy

By: Chee Yi Ong

Originally published on May 15, 2020, and updated on April 17, 2024. What's been updated: This ultimate guide and its companion code repository now support compileSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion 34 (Android 14). The APIs used in this…

BLE

BLE Connectivity Architecture: The Ultimate Guide

By: Alec Letourneau

Introduction Building your first connected product is no easy task. There are many wireless networking protocols, each with its benefits and tradeoffs. However, if you're interested in widespread support, including iOS or Android devices…

BLE

The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your BLE Connection

By: Bret Hassler

Introduction One of the core aspects of designing a BLE application is determining how connections will be managed. There’s more to it than simply starting a connection whenever the devices should communicate. You must consider the…

BLE

Architecting iOS and Android Apps for IoT BLE Systems

By: Gretchen Walker

When you buy a Fitbit, you’re not just paying for the wearable hardware. You’re buying a key that unlocks access to a greater integrated system. Before you can even start using the device, you must first download the app, pair it with your…

Mobile Apps

Mastering all 5 Kotlin Scope Functions

By: Chee Yi Ong

It should come as no surprise that our Android team here at Punch Through loves Kotlin, and that we strive to write idiomatic Kotlin, taking advantage of its unique language features whenever possible. Some common questions we get from newer team…

Punch Through Office where engineers use rx and delegate programming on iOS

Mobile Apps

Using Rx vs Delegates with CoreBluetooth

By: Julian Hays

Reactive (or “Rx”) style programming is quickly becoming a popular design pattern in mobile development. What is it, and how does it compare to the tried-and-true delegation pattern? Should you be using Rx on your next mobile project? Follow…

Ultimate Guide to Apple's Core Bluetooth library

BLE

The Ultimate Guide to Apple’s Core Bluetooth

By: Gretchen Walker

This article assumes you know the very basics of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and iOS programming (including the delegation pattern for asynchronous calls common to many iOS native APIs), and is meant as a comprehensive guide to the ins and outs of…

Engineer working on Human Interface Devices in office

Mobile Apps

How iOS and Android Handle Connections with BLE Human Interface Devices

By: Alec Letourneau

iOS and Android’s Bluetooth APIs allow apps to communicate with BLE devices. The API simplifies the way apps implement BLE and allows multiple apps to use BLE at the same time, but it also introduces many undocumented behaviors. Unfortunately,…

Mobile Apps

Unit Testing Android BLE Code with RxAndroidBle

By: Chee Yi Ong

In this post, we look at what RxAndroidBle offers as far as unit testing is concerned, and we’ll also walk through a case study of unit testing a common BLE business logic. Seasoned Android developers will no doubt have heard of RxJava—a…

Mobile Apps

Mobile Developer’s Advice for Implementing Device Firmware Updates

By: Julian Hays

When developing mobile apps for connected devices, handling device firmware updates (DFU) is a common task we need to tackle. Device firmware updating is the process of installing new programming onto an embedded device. By leveraging BLE…

Engineers meeting about Kotlin language features

Mobile Apps

Our 5 Favorite Kotlin Features

By: Chee Yi Ong

When Swift was released by Apple for iOS developers, Android developers were in awe and envious of this modern programming language that provides null-safety and an expressive yet concise syntax. Thankfully, the Android Studio 3.0 release in 2017…

Mobile Apps

Boost Productivity with 4 Android Studio Tips

By: Ashish Derhgawen

For those of us writing Android apps for a living, Android Studio is our bread and butter. Optimizing Android Studio will make your development experience both enjoyable and productive. In this blog post, I will share some tips to improve build…

Mobile Apps

What to Consider Before Building a Mobile Medical App

By: Alec Letourneau

So, you want to build a mobile app for use in medical or health applications and believe that it may fall under government regulations? Getting regulatory approval is no small task, but focusing on building a great product will significantly…

BLE

How Apple and Google’s Bluetooth Contact Tracing Framework Actually Works

By: Chee Yi Ong

The COVID-19 pandemic affects us all, with public life seeing disruptions at an unprecedented scale. To help curb the spread of the disease, Apple and Google have announced a joint effort to develop a contact tracing framework with a heavy focus on…

Mobile Apps

Why Re-Signing iOS Apps is Better than Recompiling

By: Alec Letourneau

Re-signing iOS apps allows you to open your app after it’s been built and modify everything except the application code. The main reason to use this process is to avoid recompiling an app and risking the introduction of unintended changes.…

engineers sitting discussing Apple's Swift Package Manager

Mobile Apps

How to Use Apple’s Swift Package Manager

By: Julian Hays

A package manager, also sometimes referred to as a dependency manager, is a tool that facilitates installing, updating, and configuring other code packages to make them available within your software. Many iOS developers will already be very…

Engineer learning about Android Debug Bridge

Mobile Apps

How to Set Up Wireless Debugging with Android Debug Bridge

By: Ashish Derhgawen

Writing apps for Android devices can often be challenging enough as it is. Having to deal with different USB cables (or cables that don’t work) just adds to the struggle. It wasn't until recently that I found you could avoid a lot of cable issues…

Team of engineers learning about background Bluetooth

Mobile Apps

Leveraging Background Bluetooth for a Great User Experience

By: Alec Letourneau

One of the most important things that users want when using a connected product is to be able to put its app in a folder and forget about it, trusting that it’ll work. Designing apps with this capability goes far beyond a product’s physical…

Punch Through team discussing mobile development

Mobile Apps

3 Reasons Native iOS and Android Apps are Better for Connected Products

By: Punch Through

One decision must be made before developing a mobile app: native or hybrid. For many developers, preconceived notions lead them down the hybrid route, believing it to be cheaper and more efficient with a "one-code-fits-all" approach. However,…

Group of Punch Through team members who recommend Android App Tools and Patterns

Mobile Apps

Our Preferred Android Development Tools and Patterns

By: Chee Yi Ong

At Punch Through, we work on both greenfield and legacy app projects for our clients. For greenfield Android projects, we generally try to conform to a modern, well-documented, and well-supported architectural pattern that’s easy to follow. The…

Mobile Apps

How to Handle iOS 13’s New Bluetooth Permissions

By: Alec Letourneau

iOS 13's new Bluetooth permissions have sparked many questions, and everyone’s concluding that Bluetooth apps are tracking them. With the inevitable backlash that will arise from this conclusion, will everyone start denying apps access to…

Computer coding with Android and Bluetooth symbol - Android BLE tips

Mobile Apps

4 Tips to Make Android BLE Actually Work

By: Chee Yi Ong

Android development is hard, and it's no thanks to its relatively fragmented ecosystem and having a million OEM’s out there. Throw BLE—which is extremely hardware and Bluetooth spec. dependent!—into the mix and the platform's behavior becomes…

Mobile Apps

CoreNFC – The Missing Link

By: Punch Through

Near-field communication (NFC) is standardized by ISO/IEC 18092. While not a new technology it has become more important with the proliferation of mobile devices. Phone manufacturers have increasingly begun to incorporate NFC hardware in their…

Mobile Apps

What is an iBeacon

By: Punch Through

At this year’s WWDC, Apple quietly announced one of their upcoming products for iOS 7, the iBeacon. Even if you’ve been following WWDC and the iOS 7 announcements, you might not have heard of the iBeacon. And even if you’ve heard the name,…

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