April 19, 2016 — In part 1 of this tutorial we started building our iOS app from scratch. We started out by setting up a blank React Native project. Then we pulled data from the Unsplash.it API. Because downloading data takes time, we built a loading screen. In the process we went over … Read More…

April 12, 2016 — The idea of building mobile apps with JavaScript is not new. We’ve seen frameworks like Ionic and PhoneGap take on the challenge, and to some extent succeed in gaining a fair amount of developer and community support.

These frameworks and the whole idea of building mobile …

March 30, 2016 — If you’ve ever had to move your iPad from one hand to the other just to tap a button you couldn’t reach, then you may have already guessed why we began this study in our UX lab. Our Mail.Ru Group’s UX lab team carries out many usability studies of our apps for smartphones … Read More…

September 22, 2015 — Cross-OS mobile app development is often excruciating, between the multiple languages, the different expectations from users about interactions and the sheer development time. Our goal was to cut through the typical pains in the app development process and create a … Read More…

August 27, 2015 — One sunny morning in the summer of 2014, I was sitting in a café having just finished an hour-long call with my remote team. Scheduling that call had been a messy exercise: we live in different time zones and it was hard to find a time that worked for everyone. I wanted to … Read More…

March 10, 2015 — Working with text has long been the domain of desktops and notebooks. Yet the screen size, resolution and software of mobile devices have improved in recent years, which has made typing a fairly large amount of text quite achievable. A number of apps and techniques are … Read More…

January 14, 2015 — Mobile application ecosystems — let’s count Android and iOS here — are unbelievably dynamic, but they also suffer from both software and hardware fragmentation. This is especially true for Android, but fragmentation also exists in the iOS ecosystem, as experienced with the … Read More…

September 22, 2014 — Are you a web designer or developer who dreams about creating a mobile game and bringing it to the app store? We have good news: Your road to the app store might be shorter than you think! And if you can recall your experience with ActionScript and the Flash platform from … Read More…

July 28, 2014 — Look at your calendar. If you’re anything like me, all you see are meetings, places to go, things to do, people to meet and not a lot of white space. Few people love their calendar. So, we set out to change that, and we learned a lot in the process. Our app is an iPhone app … Read More…