While building the push notifications feature for our iOS Chat app, we've encountered the need to send device to device push notifications in Swift with Firebase. Until a while ago, this was not even possible without running your own server, but fortunately, Google Cloud Messaging platform has evolved tremendously within the last year, and now sending app-to-app push notifications directly from Swift is totally doable. Broadcasting remote push notifications from Firebase Console UI is straightforward since it only involves a few clicks on a nice GUI. But mobile apps are more complicated than that – in many cases, you need to notify a specific user about actions that were triggered by other users. A few concrete examples where we are using device to device push notifications in our Swift app templates:

As an iOS developer spending most of my time in Xcode, I realized how unproductive I was due to constantly switching back and forth between Xcode, Terminal, Github, and Source Tree. As a result, I decided to dive into Xcode Git integration with Github. Let’s take a look at the Github integrated features and how they can help you become a better and more productive iOS developer.

In this article, I would like to showcase the basics of iOS data persistence with Swift, by presenting a general overview of what’s possible. Data persistence is the mechanism of storing any type of data to disk so that the same data can be retrieved without being altered when the user opens the app next time. While you could save the same data on a server, in this tutorial we are going to describe all the ways to store data locally in iOS apps.

In this article we are going to learn how to implement the powerful MVVM design pattern in SwiftUI applications that are leveraging the Combine framework. The combination of these 3 concepts will be the standard of iOS app architecture for the years to come, so it’s really important to set up a solid groundwork when it comes to designing Swift apps going forward.

Presenting data through graphs and charts is one of the most remarkable features of mobile applications today. iOS Charts make apps look more beautiful and noticeably more attractive. We already integrated a number of Swift Charts into many mobile app templates such as the Dashboard iOS App Template or Personal Finance iOS App Template.

When designing a template for your mobile app, there’s always the need of using images, icons, and various other UI assets. If you’re only working on a prototype, investing too much time or money for purchasing these assets is not really worth it, so you always end up looking for free mobile icons and images. In this article, we list a handful of websites that offer free mobile icons and images, which you can use in your mobile app, without worrying about copyright infringement.

In today’s privacy-focused world, keeping a high bar for the security of our iOS apps, by storing critical user data securely is more important than ever. When handling sensitive user data such as passwords, in-app purchases, etc, in iOS apps, a mobile developer needs to take security into consideration. In our App Templates, we are taking security very seriously, by making it part of our core values. In this tutorial, we will show you how to use the Keychain in Swift to store sensitive user data by implementing a persistent login feature on iOS.

As we have mentioned in previous posts, there are more and more iOS applications in App Store and obviously we are living in a highly competitive market. Hence, creativity and differentiation are essential for success. In today’s article, we will show you a great feature that makes apps feel more playful and performant – haptic feedback. We’ll learn how to generate haptics feedback in Swift with code examples.

iOS has built-in support for adding shadows to UIView components. All you need to do in order to add a shadow to a UIView object is to set the shadow properties of the view’s layer. Shadows are a powerful user interface design element, making the visual components stand out by giving them a 3D look and feel. In order to display a shadow in Swift, iOS allows you to specify its color, opacity, offset and radius. Our recommendation is to try out different values for these variables, to see for yourself what are they exactly.

Localization is the process of adapting a client app to a specific language. A localized mobile app renders all its content in the user’s language. In this article, we discuss a few key aspects on why you should localize iOS apps. While it could be obvious while this is a good idea, most developers would rather not invest time for localizing their apps, when working on a minimum viable product. Even if you don’t plan on adding localization support initially, it’s recommended to keep an eye on localization while writing your code, to make sure you won’t run into much trouble when the time for localizing the app comes.