We have already covered why certificate pinning in mobile apps is important and have shown how to implement it both in iOS and Android. For the sake of simplicity, we had to omit a lot of nasty details and corner cases from our example. In the real world, the code might get complex with time very quickly, when you have to support various legacy iOS platforms, various popular networking libraries out there etc. Luckily, nice folks at DataTheorem have created and open-sourced a framework for SSL pinning which eliminates that simplifies most of it.

In this day and age more and more user data is stored electronically. Users are expecting end-to-end security from every application they are installing on their devices. Application developers too, are seeking to secure all communications between their apps and backends in order to prevents hackers from reverse engineering their protocols and getting access to their databases.

The most basic form of security when transferring data between the application and the service backend is SSL/TLS encryption, and it is very common for developers today to switch their traffic to https and declare their communications as secure. In fact mobile platforms today make it really hard for developers not to use https. That by itself, however, is not enough. Encryption is useless when communicating parties can not validate the identity of their piers.

While the need to listen to scroll events of arbitrary views in Android has always existed, no such mechanisms were provided by Google until Android API level 23. That is when View.OnScrollChangeListener made its appearance. Until then, some views (e.g ListView) had custom mechanisms to listen to scroll events, but there was no common way. We, at Bugsee, have faced this problem while working on automatic concealment of protected web page elements (see Bugsee Privacy). We had to know when elements change their position, and no such mechanism exists for WebView for earlier Android versions.

Debugging is an important process to understand the unexpected behaviour of your application. For this reason, we must know well how to use the breakpoints to reduce the time needed to fix the bugs. Sometimes, a simple breakpoint is not enough.

In this article, I’ll explain the main advanced options and generic breakpoints available in Xcode—version 8.3.2 at the time of writing.

Most of the mobile applications these days require some form of a backend. Usually it is used for something trivial, like maintaining user profiles, settings and scores etc. However, most often than not, the application needs to upload some files to your server. The following tutorial will show how to do it securely and efficiently using AWS S3. Why spawn powerful servers that can handle huge amounts of traffic when all they do is get the files and store them on S3 anyway? Files can be uploaded to S3 directly, and S3 infrastructure can scale with our application and adjust to the amounts of traffic required. All we need to do is implement a simple lightweight API endpoint that will instruct the client where to upload the heavy things and let S3 do the heavy lifting.