Cloudy

Have you ever used a cloud service to support the function of a mobile app? Whether it’s AWS, Azure, Firebase, some other service, or even a server of your own, it’s time to learn. Cloud services allow users to work seamlessly across multiple device contexts, as well as making it possible for users to interact with each other. Getting familiar with how to set up and interact with these services will increase the scope of projects you can handle.

If you’ve used one of them and gotten comfortable with it, I strongly suggest at least trying out one or two others. Not all services are the same; they have their own strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. There’s no one perfect operating system or programming language, and there’s certainly not one perfect cloud service.

Using a cloud service is also a good way to get used to the idea of handling users with intermittent or context based connectivity. While modern mobile devices are usually within range of connectivity of some sort, you can’t take that connectivity as a given.  Ideally, as much functionality of your app as possible should be available offline. For some apps this might be a very small set of functions, but even a little bit helps, particularly if you handle the transition back to connectivity well. Build the user’s trust!

This also means that you need to handle more complicated testing scenarios around connectivity issues. Don’t just test on wifi! Test on cell data. Test on minimal and intermittent cell connectivity. Be inventive and some up with the worst case scenarios you can think of and test those. You can’t test everything, but catching issues before the code is deployed is generally cheaper than handling support calls/emails and is less destructive of user trust.