Tagged “app”

Although I don’t work on native apps, I’ve recently been wondering about how accessibility considerations for them compare to those for websites. So this is a timely and useful reference.

iOS provides a lot of accessibility behavior for free, so it’s a great start to making a mobile application accessible. Unfortunately, accessibility is more complicated than the iOS behavior can address, and using only default behavior can actually cause the app to have additional issues.

Roderick E.J.H. Gadellaa, author of the Webventures blog writes that at their June 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) Apple announced that it will bring Web Push (web-based push notifications) to Safari, including iOS Safari.

MacOS is going to get it first and iOS will receive it in a later iOS 16.x update, sometime in 2023.

This could be a big deal, because…

The lack of the web being able to do push notifications on iOS is probably the biggest reason why web developers see a potential project end up being built as a native app instead of a web app

…and…

Web Push on iOS will change the “we need to build a native app” decision.

I don’t like the idea that native mobile apps are superior to mobile web experiences, nor the notion that by having a native app you can ignore your small-screen web experience. PWAs and native apps can co-exist in harmony and address different use cases. But also web APIs are becoming more powerful all the time, and this announcement by Apple provides fuel for the argument that “you might not need a native app for that!”

Rubadub have a new mobile app that delivers the RaD crew’s top vinyl recommendations (the best around) direct to your phone.

At a time when lots of vinyl releases are highly limited, this gets you early access to the latest heat before it disappears. It should also generally save untold hours browsing/searching since in their recommendations Rubadub have already done the job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

The app was developed by me and the team at Greenhill.

It was quite tricky, because aside from developing the mobile app itself there was a lot of API work needed to integrate it with Rubadub’s stock and e-commerce systems. We also built middleware specifically for machine-learning customer tastes.

The current v1 app handles the core feature of letting people listen to, save and buy records but there’s a lot of cool stuff vis-a-vis personalised messaging and taste-based recommendations on the roadmap. I’ve written about this in more detail over on Greenhill’s site.

The long-term idea is that it becomes the app equivalent of the actual record shop experience...i.e. going into Rubadub on Howard St and one of the guys/gals handing you a pile of tunes with a side of witty repartee.

If you’re a vinyl junkie like me or into electronic music in general, I recommend checking it out.