Another year has flown by, and we have yet another major iOS update to contend with!
On Wednesday, September 16, Apple is expected to release iOS 9, the next iteration of its immensely popular mobile OS. What does this mean for hybrid and native mobile developers who are using Telerik Platform? Read on to find out.
NativeScript
One of the core benefits of leveraging NativeScript for your native mobile app development needs is the promise of day zero support for new operating systems. This is still the case today, as we support the entire set of iOS 9 APIs!
Specifically, you can check out some existing blog posts related to deep linking in iOS 9 and another on building a widget for the iOS notification center.
Hybrid (Cordova/PhoneGap)
Hybrid developers specifically need to know about some breaking changes that Apple introduced with iOS 9:
- Users of our WKWebView plugin should upgrade their apps to the latest version, which provides full support for iOS 9.
- Tried our new Apple Watch plugin yet? We made some tweaks to ensure compatibility with iOS 9.
- Users of Angular/Ionic have reported a critical bug that requires a fix.
- Bitcode is enabled by default, so any custom Cordova plugins you use will have to be built for bitcode.
App Transport Security
What is this ATS thing? If you've heard the buzz about App Transport Security, what you really need to know is iOS 9 requires all of your remote endpoints to be accessed securely with the HTTPS protocol. This is a great best practice, and you should definitely implement this going forward.
In the meantime, a quick workaround is to add the following key to your info.plist file:
<key>NSAppTransportSecurity</key>
<dict>
<key>NSAllowsArbitraryLoads</key> <true/>
</dict>
Here are the instructions for editing these configuration files in Telerik AppBuilder.
Telerik Backend Services
In an upcoming release of Backend Services, we will provide full support for iOS 9 push notifications. This means your users will be able to input text directly into a notification and you can handle responses from these actions created by your users.
We will also be migrating to a new Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) API which will make enabling push even easier as it removes the requirement for separate production and development certificates!
Looking Ahead
Here at Telerik, we are actively testing our cloud-based build servers with the latest SDKs from Apple, and we plan on officially releasing iOS 9 support in an upcoming release. In the meantime, rest assured if you follow the advice in this article, your existing apps will work just fine on this new OS.
