Useful materials for mobile developer # 67 (August 18-24)

Twenty years to the first smartphone, analyzing why Swift is so fast, the annual Unity conference with several interesting updates, VKontakte launches mobile advertising for apps, in California they are trying to remotely “kill” smartphones - this is a little bit about this weekly digest.

Porting your favorite Android game

Making the game process is exciting and informative. This is especially noticeable when you make a remake of the “classics” yourself, guided by the ideas of the original and dozens of hours spent on the campaign. I didn’t have any significant development experience for Android, so the creation of a working “as it should be” application for a tablet at first looked rather vague, but it’s no less attractive. Given the time and opportunity, you can shake off the dust from old games, grease and glue, adding support for “large” resolutions and it turns out that they look no worse than modern products laid out on the market, even with an RGB565 palette without an alpha channel.
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Swift Speed Secrets

From the moment Swift was announced, speed was a key element of marketing. No wonder - it is mentioned in the very name of the language (swift, eng. - “fast”). It was stated that it is faster than dynamic languages like Python and Javascript, potentially faster than Objective C, and in some cases even faster than C! But how exactly did they do it?

IBM Simon: the world's first smartphone turned 20 years old

20 years ago, in August 1994, an unusual device appeared on the US mobile device market: IBM Simon. This device was a hybrid of a mobile phone, PDA, pager, organizer, and much more, plus it supported connection to a fax.

An honest look at the first year of Unread

My goal is to share the Unread development details with my colleagues. I especially hope that this post will be useful to all those who plan to take on the development alone, as I did this last summer. Unread will be an instructive story for some, no doubt. For others, it may become a source of inspiration, an indicator of opportunities that lie in an independent development.