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Latest Mobile Dev Insights: iOS, Android, Cross-Platform

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MobilePro #163: Google I/O 2025, Latest Updates in Flutter and Android 16, and more…

Hi ,

Welcome to the very first edition of MobilePro for 2025! We’ve been away for some time, but we're back with vigor and fresh new insights. We are here to deliver all recent happenings from the world of mobile development straight to your inbox. This edition features a roundup of top mobile dev news, including details on the upcoming Google I/O, Apple Intelligence finally supporting new languages, and discussions around UI development in Flutter. We also have a new Developer Tip section to enhance your workflow and a Did You Know? section, because how else can you plan for the future without knowing your past?

Let’s dive in!

P.S.: If you have any suggestions or feedback, or would like us to feature your project on a particular subject, please write to us. Just respond to this email!

📱 What's Happening in Mobile Development?

If there’s any major news in the world of mobile app dev in the last week, MobilePro has you covered.

All you need to know about Google I/O 2025: It’ll soon be summer and with that Google I/O will roll into town, with dates set for May 20-21, 2025. Android 16 might as well be the focus due to it prevailing rumors of it foregoing a usual Q3/Q4 release for an earlier Q2 release. But that’s not all, Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to gather a major foothold and we’re sure Google will have lots to say about that as well. To know what else the Google I/O 2025 could cover, head over to Android Authority for a lowdown.
Additional language support for Apple Intelligence: Hopping over to the iOS side of things, Apple sneakily mentioned in its press release for the iPhone 16e that support for additional languages for Apple Intelligence will finally be available in April 2025. There’s a good sprinkling of languages from around the world: French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified) as well as two variants of English (Singapore and India). AppleInsider has you covered.
What’s new in Flutter 3.29: Flutter 3.29 arrived on February 12, bringing a host of improvements to streamline development and enhance performance. This update fine-tunes Impeller for smoother rendering, polishes Cupertino widgets for a more refined iOS experience, and introduces new DevTools features to simplify debugging. This post on Flutter's official Medium account has all the info!
The second beta of Android 16 is live: Android 16 Beta 2 landed on February 13, packing in a range of updates designed to enhance both user experience and developer capabilities. This release introduces advanced camera features, like hybrid auto-exposure and precise color temperature adjustments—perfect for pro-level photography. Graphics get a boost with new visual effects, while performance frameworks see further optimization. Developers can get hands-on with the latest updates by enrolling supported Pixel devices. Android Developers Blog has the details.
Play Protect’s new abilities for a safer app ecosystem: Google is taking further precaution in a bid to stop malicious apps from wreaking havoc on your Android phone. It has doubled down on giving its Play Protect service additional authority to turn off an app’s permissions. Google is taking no chances, even displaying notifications constantly in case you decide to manually switch off Play Protect. To understand why Google is doing so, Google Security Blog has an explainer.

💭 What is the Mobile Community Talking About?

What are mobile app developers discussing? Do you have any concerns, advice, or tutorials to share? MobilePro brings them to you all in one place.

Android’s edge-to-edge Activity API simplifies backwards compatibility for full-screen layouts: Android’s Edge-to-Edge Activity API is here to take the hassle out of building full-screen layouts, especially when dealing with older Android versions. By handling system UI elements more efficiently, the API ensures a smooth and consistent edge-to-edge experience across devices—without the usual version-specific workarounds. If you’re working with Android SDK versions older than Android 11 (SDK 30), this Medium step-by-step article by Luke Simpson explains how you can implement it.
How to develop your UI instinct within Flutter: While you may be an expert in Flutter, UI design within it is an altogether different ball game. What is the best way to develop your skills on that front? Should you look at older designs? Is there any documentation to help you get through this? u/fotisstoy had the same question on the r/FlutterDev subreddit and received many helpful answers from the Flutter community.
How to solve developer login fatigue with a custom Android keyboard: Logging in over and over again can be a pain, but AccountFastTrack offers a clever solution: a custom Android keyboard designed to speed up authentication. This keyboard integrates account management right into the typing experience, letting developers bypass repetitive login steps for a smoother workflow. Want to see how it works? This post on Medium by Ammarptn tells you how.
Timekeeping made easier: Many apps rely on a phone’s in-built time to run their features. This can lead to a lot of chaos if the phone’s user has unwittingly (or on purpose) played around with the time settings on the device. Fear not, though, as Kanyinsola Fapohunda and Geoffrey Boullanger have created the TrustedTime API that syncs itself to Google’s servers, thus ensuring that the time is always right. They’ve elaborated on the API at the Android Developers Blog.

📚️ Latest in Mobile Development from Packt

MobilePro presents the latest titles from Packt that ought to be useful for mobile developers.

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Flutter Design Patterns and Best Practices

Buy now at $44.99

Mobile App Development Tutorial — Excerpt from Mastering iOS 18 Development by Avi Tsadok

Home screen widgets for iOS are a very recent development with iOS 14, and now with iOS 18, third-party apps are allowed access to widgets on the home screen as well as in the control center. Avi Tsadok in Mastering iOS 18 Development elaborates on how to make full use of this newfound freedom to make your app’s presence felt on the home screen. What follows is an excerpt on how to add your widget to the control center using WidgetKit:

Similar to how we create a widget by conforming to the Widget protocol, we need to conform to the ControlWidget protocol to create a control widget. For example, imagine we have an app that helps us control smart home accessories, and we want to create a widget that opens and closes our home’s main door. Let’s start by creating a simple control widget called MaindoorControl:

struct MaindoorControl: ControlWidget {
 var body: some ControlWidgetConfiguration {
 StaticControlConfiguration(
 kind: "com.avitsadok.MaindoorControl"
 ) {
// rest of the widget goes here
 }
 }
}

In this code example, the MaindoorControl widget contains the body variable from the time of ControlWidgetConfiguration. In this case, we return an instance of the StaticControlConfiguration type, which means we don’t give the user the ability to configure it. However, similar to the home screen widget, we can also add a user-configurable control widget by returning AppIntentControlConfiguration.

We can add two control widget controls – a toggle and a button. In the case of controlling our home’s main door state, we need to add a toggle. Let’s modify our code and add a ControlWidgetToggle instance:

struct MaindoorControl: ControlWidget {
 var body: some ControlWidgetConfiguration {
 StaticControlConfiguration(
 kind: "com.avitsadok.MaindoorControl"
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 ) {
 ControlWidgetToggle(
 "Main door control",
 isOn: HouseManager.shared.isOpen,
 action: MaindoorIntent()
 ) { isOn in
 Label(isOn ? "Opened" : "Closed",
 systemImage: isOn ?
 "door.left.hand.open" :
 "door.left.hand.closed")
 }
 }
 }
}

In this code example, we add the ControlWidgetToggle, containing the following parameters:

A title – The widget title that appears for the widget in the widget gallery.
isOn – Here, we connect the widget to the actual state in our app.
action – The App Intent that runs when the user taps our control widget. We’ll cover that later in this section.
A view builder – In the view builder, we define how a Label displays the control state’s title and an image.

The widget instance is straightforward. Let’s see how it looks in our control center:

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***

You can read Avi Tsadok’s further thoughts and work in Mastering iOS 18 Development.

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Mastering iOS 18 Development

Buy now at$41.99

💡️ Developer Tip

“Avoid the golden hammer. There is no one way to do something and learn early on to formulate your options, pros and cons, and pick the one that works for that situation. Also avoid cultures that enforce this “one way to do something”.” — Melvyn Sopacua

Sourced from Medium.

In case you have any tips to share with your fellow mobile developers, do reply to this mail and we’d be glad to feature you in a future edition of MobilePro.

❓ Did You Know?

According to Sensor Tower's Mobile App Market Forecast 2030, consumers are projected to spend over $2.2 trillion on apps between 2021 and 2030, with annual spending reaching $288 billion by 2030. Additionally, nearly 2.9 trillion new apps and games are expected to be downloaded during this period, reflecting a 123% increase from the previous decade. Total time spent on mobile devices is anticipated to surpass 58 trillion hours over the decade. Check out Sensor Tower’s complete forecast.

👋 And that’s a wrap. We hope you enjoyed this new and improved MobilePro. If you have any suggestions and feedback, or would just like to say hi to us—maybe you reacted joyously to our lovely new banner!—please write to us. Just respond to this email!

Cheers,

Runcil Rebello,

Editor-in-Chief, MobilePro