News & Views

• Mobile Apps
• Data

Smarter App Design Should Feel Like Magic

Has Amazon ever noticed you check your tracking status a lot and started to provide push notifications showing where your packages are on their way to you? If you’ve caught a ride with Uber lately or loaded up your maps application, it’s probably suggested a location based on the time of day and where it knows you usually go and when. Can you recall getting a message from your email software offering you the simple option to unsubscribe from newsletters you usually don’t open?

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• Analytics
• Mobile Apps

Every Business Needs An Analytics Strategy For Their Mobile App

Why does Google personalize your YouTube recommendations?

Why does Facebook show you only recommended posts and not every post from all your friends in the order in which they were posted?

The simple answer to that is this: because the data told them you would like this.

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• Hack Days
• Mobile Apps

AR-Based App Concept Takes Stress Out of Finding a Workspace

Working from home is wonderful in theory. But even the most motivated professionals find it’s hard to stay motivated when they work in the same place where they binge-watch The Office.

As a result, the work-from-home trend has given rise to “coworking” spaces — rentable individual workspaces in traditional office settings — that are proliferating across the country. They’re now easy to find in most major cities, and offer a wide range of office perks that can include conference rooms, collaborative spaces and, most importantly, coffee.

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• Design
• Mobile Apps

A Billion-Dollar Market in 120x120 Pixels

Humans form first impressions within seven seconds of meeting each other, and the effects of an introductory handshake can last for one to six months. That’s pretty significant if you’re an entrepreneur networking, or a salesperson promoting your product or service. Within the app store, the importance of first impressions is just as clear. In this marketplace, which generates 70 percent of app downloads, an app’s icon is a digital handshake with a consumer and can make or break a consumer’s decision to download, create an account, or even just engage with a brand.

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• Mobile Apps
• UX/UI

Video Killed The Radio Star, But Not The Mobile App

Video content is quickly becoming the predominant form of media consumption for this generation. More than 75% of video watched is on mobile phones, making them the largest conduit for video marketing. In fact, 28 percent of smartphone users consume video on their devices at least once per day. Combine this with the fact that, as of 2016, more people globally accessed the internet via mobile and tablet devices (51.3 percent) than desktop (48.7 percent), it quickly becomes clear that if brands are not optimizing their marketing strategy with mobile video in mind, they are losing out.

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• Design
• Mobile Apps
• UX/UI

Building the Hotel Experience of the Future

Faced with pressure from the rapidly evolving travel industry, hotels are challenged by changing customer expectations and new competitive threats. To keep up, hotels have the opportunity to enhance their guests’ stays, bringing increasingly convenient and personalized experiences through tech innovation.

So, our design and innovation team partnered to design a proof of concept for a new, connected hotel experience.

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• iOS
• Insights
• Mobile Apps
• News
• iPhone
• iPad

Why Companies Should Care About Apple's WWDC 2019 Announcements

It’s easy to understand why all eyes were on this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, with Apple introducing feature after feature over the course of a two and a half hour event. It’s a chance for thousands of coders and creatives to gather together to learn what’s coming up next in tech.

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• Development
• iOS
• iPad
• iPhone
• Mobile Apps
• News

Upcoming Changes to App Store Reviews

Update: With the release of iOS 10.3 to the public, Apple has provided documentation on how to manage and respond to users on the App Store.

iOS 10.3 is shaping up to be a significant update and we here at Vokal want to specifically address the updates to the iOS App Store review platform. We want to help you understand what the changes entail, what the impacts are and how to best leverage the change to positively impact your product.

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• iOS
• Mobile Apps
• Development
• Coding
• iPad
• iPhone

Life in the Fastlane

The engineering teams here at Vokal are constantly tweaking and refining our process and tools to ensure that we’re reliably and efficiently producing our best possible work. On the iOS team, this includes ongoing improvement to our continuous build server implementation on Travis.

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• Mobile Apps
• Development
• iOS
• iPad
• iPhone
• Coding

Open Sourcing Our Xcode Project Templates

Every app we build is unique, but best practices should be consistent between projects. Here on Vokal’s iOS team, we’ve been baking more and more of those best practices into a template we use for starting any new project.

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