How can you maintain mobile app development tools?

In every app team, there should be a dedicated tech person who should take care of maintaining the tech tools for the project. That person should take care of checking the compatibility, migrating to the latest one by properly intimating the product tech teams.

One of the most important aspects of maintaining mobile app development tools is to update them regularly. Updating your tools can help you fix bugs, improve performance, add features, and support new platforms and devices. You should always check for updates from the official sources of your tools and follow the instructions to install them. Staying on top of mobile app development tool updates is not just about maintenance but also an opportunity to enhance your app's performance and capabilities. By following these best practices, you can ensure a smooth and productive development process while keeping your apps secure and up-to-date with the latest technology trends.

I agree that updating tools should be done at the right time. However, maintaining the tools with small, regular updates can help reduce the cost of keeping them up-to-date and avoid the expense of major updates over long periods. Additionally, reading changelogs related to these tools updates can greatly assist our decision-making process.

In my view, employing version control and testing tools is the most effective approach for staying up-to-date with contemporary tech trends. By doing so, you can trace back every modification made, which provides a significant advantage in pinpointing the potential updates that may have caused any issues.

I recommend unit-testing as a second thing to implement in your mobile project. After you set up your dependency injection library or service locator. This is the stuff you want to do together with writing production code. The benefits are amazing, if you are working on larger codebases this saves you so much time. I am yet to know a developer that has never used git, and this tool in my opinion is amazing. You can track everything that has ever been done to your software. And having the ability to rollback and go back in time when things worked has saved me many times :)

Version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and others are essential since you need to track your progress and changes during the whole time of the project. Testing is a good tool for big projects. While it's a small you should work more on features and providing an accurate value for your end users, but as soon as you have a big project that works and has a significant amount of users, you need to optimize everything, including testing, to be aware of all possible bugs and issues to provide the best UX for your users. Start writing tests from Unit Tests and then grow them to UI, Network, Database, and End-To-End tests.

Another way to maintain mobile app development tools is to learn new skills and techniques. The mobile industry is constantly evolving and introducing new trends, standards, and technologies. To keep up with these changes, you need to learn new skills and techniques that can help you improve your app development process and product. You can learn from online courses, tutorials, blogs, podcasts, books, and other resources that cover the latest topics and best practices of mobile app development.

A good way to maintain your mobile app development is to always be updated with the new updates in development components. For example after the launch of Kotlin people were hesitant to migrate their code from java to Kotlin and keep doing development in Java, until google force them to do so and at that time effort required to migrate their code base to Kotlin was so big as compared to 3 years ago when the kotlin was first Launched.

The key to success is never stopping learning. The mobile industry is so vast that clinging to just one skill puts you one step behind. Learning new skills and languages enhances your potential to think outside the box when solving problems. It boosts adaptability and broadens your scope.

Always have your code written in neat form. Don't have to much commented or unused code inside your code base. It will make difficult for some other person and even sometimes for you to understand that how the functionality is working by looking at your code. Always divide your code in module so that it can be readable and useable as well

Having clean code is not just "follow crowd" thing but it really helps in many situations and one of very important outcomes of good clean code is easy project scaling.

If I say you should use the best practices to maintain your code clean which makes your project more scalable and if there some dead code in your project you can get rid of, if there is no labelling why it is there. It is make your code easy to understand and good use of SOLID principles.

For functionality point of view, You should always put attention to users feedback and comments. It will help you to identify the issues in functionality of your code. For coding structure point of view, always have two or three seniors developers have reviewed your PR's in that way they can give you best advice how you can optimize your code and can be also helpful to find loopholes in your code.

Sending Pull Requests to other team members is the best way to find advice and feedback about your work. Also, use links and other resources to check the quality of your code. Your team members, especially those with bigger experience than you have, are the first persons who can tell you what's wrong and what could be better

Important things to always follow for having good code and nice app are: 1. Code review feedback 2. User feature feedback Having experienced seniors in every team should be mandatory for maintaining good code quality and doing regularly feature interviews with users should be way of working.

Use IDE plugins. They can significantly boost your productivity. Even simple and free ones, like HighlightBracketPair, can be incredibly beneficial. Plugins can automate repetitive tasks and offer real-time linting, highlighting potential errors or bad practices as you type. Many plugins provide seamless integration with external tools and services, so developers don’t need to leave the IDE to access databases, version control systems, or third-party APIs. Additionally, there are plugins that offer shortcuts, snippets, and templates, which can greatly accelerate the coding process, especially when dealing with common patterns in mobile development.

There should be a dedicated person or if the team is small you should consider at least 4-5 hours of dedicated timeslot a month to address all these tech-debts. Without this whenever a mandatory update comes or you want to add something new like compose and all you face a lot of challenge upgrading dependecies all other plugins.and upgrading to stable versions of plugins gives better performance and more features to use.

I have observed that automating tasks such as configuring and running a Continuous Integration (CI) system greatly enhances the maintenance of applications. This automation eliminates the need to concern ourselves with the intricate details of app publishing, allowing us to focus more on improving the app's functionality and user experience. Automating these processes not only saves time but also ensures a more streamlined and error-free development workflow.

Based on my experience, integrating an AI code-completion tool into your IDE can be extremely helpful for speeding up app development. When working in a startup environment, I am always seeking ways to develop faster while keeping the codebase healthy at the same time. An AI assistant is super helpful in handling the trivial and non-creative parts of coding, such as adding logs or completing commonly used methods like CRUD.