10 posts
You know I love talking about in app purchases and subscriptions. Due to my InAppBilling library I get all the "fun" updates when Apple or Google force developers to make changes to stay compliant. Upcoming is a nice large change from Google to push Android developers to use Billing v4 (which my library does!) and another is that we must now give users a way to easily manage and cancel their subscriptions. …
James Montemagno
In the mad rush to finish my most recent app, My Cadence, I forgot to integrate an essential feature. A feature that enables my users to easily get a hold of me to report issues or request features, which is of course email support. Both Google Play and the App Store enable you to supply a support website and email, however this is a very lack luster experience for both you and your users. For your users they need to …
James Montemagno
Last week I launched a new app called My Cadence for both iOS and Android. Even though it was a quick app that only took me a week or so to build and ship, I still followed my checklist of best practices to ensure as much success as I could. I of course did real world testing myself and with TestFlight users, I tested light and dark theme modes, and I even put in-app purchases in from the start! Even with all of …
James Montemagno
My holiday hacking came early this year when I decided to build my own DIY spin bike. Soon, after a few rides, my mind started to swirl with app ideas of how to improve my ride. Then when Apple released Apple Fitness+ without support for displaying cadence information from sensors I knew I had to build an app. That app is My Cadence, which connects to a small cadence sensor and displays the current cadence. It is …
James Montemagno
The Xamarin linker is one of the most important pieces of technology when building mobile apps, that no one knows exists. It does all of the hard work for you, stripping out all unused code from libraries that you include in your apps. It should only be used in release mode as it takes extra time to compile your app, but means that your app will be smaller:
James Montemagno
One common query I get all the time from developers is how to get a unique device or application identifier for their mobile app. After deciding to not include an API for this in Xamarin.Essentials we heard a lot of different use cases for it including: Client/Server Communication Login Validation In-App Purchase Verification Licensing Purposes The next obvious question that you may have is why didn't we include it …
James Montemagno
Xamarin.Essentials is a new official library from Microsoft (that I worked on) that provides developers with over 30 cross-platform APIs for their mobile apps to tap into to access native features. Yes, this may sound similar to Plugins for Xamarin, but it is an evolution that is super optimized for each plaform, provides a consistent API, and is super crazy well documented. And of course it is completely open source …
James Montemagno
I love multi-targeting for creating libraries, and it is at the core of all of my plugins and Xamarin.Essentials. If you don't know what multi-targeting is don't worry as it is pretty rare that you would need to use it if you are creating apps. Most likely you will want to use multi-targeting in creating cross-platform libraries. In the past you would have to create multiple libraries for each target framework (such …
James Montemagno
