Mobius conference: how the unobvious were opened in mobile devices

    In 2015, eight years after the appearance of the first iPhone, it can easily seem that we already know everything important about mobile devices and development for them: they say, it remains to study the details in more detail and bring newcomers up to date, and there will be no more waiting for large-scale discoveries have to. But the Mobius conference held in St. Petersburg showed that there are a lot of innovations and non-obvious things, and even people who are developing mobile applications for the first year can learn a lot of new and interesting things. What exactly was told at the conference?





    After the official opening of Mobius, the audience gathered at the PetroCongress business center in St. Petersburg heard a keynote from two Dmitrievs at once : the legendary Zavalishin (Digital Zone)and security specialist Evdokimova (Digital Security) .

    The first talked about how the mobile revolution changed the world - and this could come down to a set of commonplace like “people got instant access to information everywhere,” but not in his case. Ever since time immemorial, when instead of the Digital Zone website there was an online column dz online on the dz.ru domain, Zavalishin was able to communicate something new about technologies instead of repeating stamps.

    For example, few people think that the success of a certain industry on mobile devices can mean a huge problem for this industry - and Zavalishin clearly explained that this happened with the media. On the one hand, consuming information on the go from smartphones and tablets is extremely convenient, this is a very obvious scenario, and such consumption has flourished. On the other hand, the advertisers, through whom the media live, are now not ready to pay much for advertising on small mobile screens, and as a result, money in the industry has become noticeably less.



    Another unobvious thing that Zavalishin drew attention to was the following: in terms of industries, the mobile revolution helps to increase profitability not directly through the money brought, but through saving on something. For example, the gradual transition of banking to mobile allowed the emergence of "banks without branches" like "Tinkoff", and this dramatically reduces costs.

    A bold assumption from him was that in the case of mobile applications, we are still waiting for a large-scale change in the entire paradigm. As Zavalishin noted, the “computer” Internet exists in the form of a continuum (allowing you to easily navigate through links in any browser at any time), and mobile devices in a more fragmented form (several different systems, inside which everything happens in separate applications, which should be for start set). And, in his opinion, mobile devices can also come to a continuum later, which will immediately give them many new opportunities.

    Finally, he said that he had already made his home “smart,” allowing you to control many of its components from a mobile device - but did not dare to include access to it from anywhere in the world, limiting yourself to a home network, because it is unsafe: “here is my faith in us [programmers] ends. " This was a logical transition to the second part of keynote, in which Dmitry Evdokimov talked about security.



    Despite the fact that everyone heard about the existence of vulnerabilities and the extent of possible harm from them, Evdokimov’s experience in auditing mobile applications allowed him to point out non-obvious points in this. For example, the same vulnerability can disappear or reappear with application updates depending on the nuances of a particular assembly - which means that it is not enough to check the application once and calm down, this should be done on an ongoing basis.

    And it’s not even necessary to be a bank, so that the vulnerability in the application is fraught with financial problems. If we are talking about a game with built-in payments, can something go wrong? It turns out that even as he can: Dmitry talked about a case in which it was possible on the player’s side to replace the payment values ​​in traffic with negative ones and receive money.

    According to him, often vulnerabilities arise where interactions with outsiders are not initially assumed, and then they simply don’t think about external interference. If you can remotely control loaders at a warehouse, then usually everyone is so busy with the question “how to make this an effective tool for warehouse workers” that they don’t ask at all what will happen if an outsider takes over the control of the loaders.

    Finally, Evdokimov was scared by the fact that in the near future with the development of smart cars that allow you to interact with them from your smartphone, the problem will only become more acute: they’re already actively working on hacking such cars, and the attacker doesn’t even need to have a whole car for training, just the head unit element .



    After keynote, when everyone parted in different sections, unobvious things did not end. For example, a report by Anton Keks (Codeborne) was devoted to the development of a Google set-top box Chromecast - and this is a topic that is undeservedly ignored. Firstly, more than 10 million such devices have already been sold in the world (that is, it is a popular platform), and secondly, Chromecast uses third-party devices to launch applications (a smartphone, tablet or computer act as a kind of “remote control”), that is, it opens a big new front for mobile development, and it still goes unnoticed by many. Partly due to the fact that the device appeared less than two years ago: although the mobile revolution as a whole took place a long time ago, here everything is just beginning. So the reportIt was not chewing on the old, but consisted of fresh information, affecting even very recent software updates.

    During the presentation, Keks explained that due to the unusual approach “requires a third-party device”, Chromecast applications consist of two parts (sender and receiver) - and demonstrated this using an example of an application written by him that displays photos from his home server on a TV screen. His presentation has links to the project itself, so anyone with a Chromecast can use it for their own purposes.



    The theme of communication of mobile devices with television was continued by the report of Alexander Korshak (Mera LLC) “50 Shades of Mobile Application Development for SmartTV”. Walking through the three competing Smart TV platforms (Philips, LG and Samsung), he stopped at the third just because of interaction with the smartphone through the Samsung MultiScreen SDK, which allows, for example, to display additional information. According to Korshak, it may be enough to add a few lines of code to an existing application to give it additional capabilities - and in such circumstances, these capabilities are clearly worth paying attention to. This SDK became available to developers only in 2014 - so the report with the presentation was nowhere more relevant.

    What should mobile developers pay more attention to - embedded solutions like this or third-party consoles like Chromecast? The question is debatable. On the one hand, Chromecast can be used with most modern TVs, it is not limited to one manufacturer. On the other hand, Smart TV features are immediately available to consumers when they buy a TV, and Chromecast, with its modest price of $ 30, needs to be purchased separately.



    After that, in the main hall Michael Samarin (Futurice) talked about the difference between the development of applications for major global brands - and its report with presentationwere unusual simply because Futurice had a unique experience in this; among its customers are Microsoft, Nokia, T-Mobile, Vodafone and other giants. Not all of them allow to publicly talk about the features of the process, but what Mikhail could tell was more than enough for an interesting story.

    Part of the report concerned technical issues: if you need to make an application simultaneously for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, is it better to use native, Xamarin or a hybrid application with Cordova? The answer is not obvious and ambiguous: for example, a lot depends on what pattern of application use is expected. If it is launched once a couple of days to quickly check something, then you can save, but if it is used often for a long time, then any unfortunate trifle will begin to annoy, and native solutions in which the specifics of each platform will be best considered are highly desirable.

    Part of the report talked about the organizational features of such a development. When two giant brands decide to create a mobile application in partnership, the developer has to take into account the strict guidelines of both at the same time - which is especially difficult when one of them is offline and has not thought about the mobile properly. And when the participants in the process are scattered around the globe, time zones also have to be taken into account, adjusting the work to a time convenient for everyone.

    Finally, the part was with simply amusing situations - and here Michael broke the applause, telling the latest story about how Futurice commissioned Microsoft to make MS-DOS for Windows Phone. This April Fools' joke, sensational right before the conference, is not just a drawing of a classic interface, but a really executing application - with an “Easter Egg” from Futurice, demonstrated to Mobius visitors.



    After lunch in the main hall, everything continued with a report by Yuri Buyanov (Odnoklassniki) “Comfortable development of mobile projects”. Here the emphasis was no longer on the originality of the material, but on the speaker’s experience: if in small startups they can be guided by the principle “if only the code worked”, then in a project of the Odnoklassniki scale, everything related to development (from storing the code to the effectiveness of interaction within the team) . And Yuri talked about all this - comparing, for example, TestFlight, HockeyApp and TestFairy as a person who is well versed in all of them.



    Chromecast and Smart TV are not the only cases in recent years when TVVA smartphones and tablets that have long been familiar to us suddenly found new opportunities. Another thing became iBeacon - “beacons” installed in certain places, interacting with a mobile device (and allowing, for example, an offline store to inform the customer that he is approaching a particularly interesting product).Denis Kretov (Notissimus) brought along a few “beacons” and shared his experience - from how to technically organize your purchase “in one click” with iBeacon, to the fact that in China they can be bought cheaply, but better not, but good ones cost $ 30 apiece.



    Then immediately two speakers from Tinkoff Bank , Kirill Bessonov and Artyom Kiselev , spoke about analytics for mobile applications. They were helped by experience that allows you to compare Google Analytics, Yandex.Metrica and Flurry for a variety of parameters. As a spoiler, you can say that Google Analytics in the pivot table showed itself in the best way - but in order to understand what is best suited specifically for your project, it’s still better to read the whole presentation.Although the whole report was serious, there were reasons to smile at the audience: for example, the use of the word smoothie in a test case clearly referred to Oleg Tinkov’s recent statements about “startups with smoothies”.



    Finally, the last in the main hall was a report on the most discussed segment of mobile devices in 2015 - “smart watches”. Alexey Rybakov (DataArt) did not stop at one variety, but talked about development for everything: Samsung devices running Tizen, Android Wear models, and, of course, Apple Watch. Here the information is not just “turned out to be relevant” - it is obvious here that a year ago such a report would have been impossible.



    This ended Mobius 2015 - and after how much new information he brought with him, it is interesting to wait for the following: probably in 2016 they will also tell us about mobile devices that it would not even have occurred to us to include them in the program.

    All speaker presentations can be downloaded from the conference website .

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