Android was introduced to the world back in 2005, and during those 12 years of existence the platform has achieved amazing success, becoming the most-installed mobile OS. During that time, 14 different versions of the operating system have been launched, with Android always becoming more mature. However, a very important area of the platform continued to be ignored: a standard architecture pattern, capable of handling the platform peculiarities and simple enough to be understood and adopted by the average developer.

SpriteKit is Apple's 2D game engine—a rendering engine built on top of OpenGL. It was introduced with iOS 7, and each subsequent release has brought great additions to the framework. With the use of textured sprites, a built-in physics engine, and the very powerful SKAction class, you can very quickly build functional 2D games.

NativeScript is a framework for building cross-platform native mobile apps using XML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this series, we'll try out some of the cool things you can do with a NativeScript app: geolocation and Google Maps integration, SQL Lite database, Firebase integration, and push notifications. Along the way, we'll build a fitness app with real-time capabilities that will use each of these features.

This is the first of a 3-part series of articles on securing data at rest. You will start off with the basics of protecting data on iOS, and the second and third articles will cover using the keychain services and encryption APIs. You'll learn the current best practices for storing data securely for users of your iOS app in Swift.

The first developer preview of Android O has arrived!

In December of 2016, Google released an updated version of the Android operating system with an option for devs to use a stripped down version for connected devices. Although Android Things is currently in an early developer preview state, it looks promising as an IoT platform both for quickly creating prototypes and for supporting users at scale.