Weekly Digest
Jan 12 - Jan 18, 2026
15 articles that week
React Native Best Practices for Building AI Agent Applications
Callstack just dropped a comprehensive guide for building AI agent apps in React Native. If you're shipping AI features to mobile, this one's packed with real-world patterns.
Flutter Development FAQs: Everything You Need to Know Before Building with Flutter
The Flutter questions teams are asking have completely changed. It's no longer 'can Flutter scale?' but 'how do we keep our 2M+ line Flutter codebase maintainable?'
Update Your Projects for AGP 9
Márton Braun from JetBrains drops a critical update: Android Gradle Plugin 9.0 just landed with breaking changes that will affect every Kotlin Android project. Time to update your build configs.
Supercharging Mobile Development with Permanent Work Trees and Claude
Umair Ali from ZAR Engineering turned weeks of mobile development work into single days by eliminating a hidden productivity killer. The secret? Rethinking how Git worktrees interact with AI coding assistants.
Making AI Feel Human in a Mobile App with Expo, Reanimated, and Skia
Daehyeon Mun built an AI companion app that earned 4.9 stars and won Expo's Most Creative App award. As a solo mobile engineer, he used custom shaders and worklet-based animations to make AI feel emotionally intelligent.
LLM Flexibility and Agent Mode Improvements
Sandhya Mohan and Trevor Johns from Google just dropped a game-changer: Android Studio now lets you use ANY LLM—OpenAI, Claude, or even local models—to power your AI coding assistant.
Performance-Focused UIKit Rendering and Animation Flow
Rabia Mercan from Teknasyon reveals why your smooth UIKit animations are secretly destroying performance. The culprit? Offscreen rendering you never knew was happening.
Bringing React Native Support to HarmonyOS NEXT
Przemek Sosna from Software Mansion reveals how his team brought React Native to Huawei's new operating system. HarmonyOS NEXT now powers 27 million devices with zero Android compatibility.
Building the Same App in SwiftUI, Kotlin Multiplatform, and Flutter — What 281 vs. 75 Lines of Code Teaches Us
Dr. Simon Bogutzky built the same bill-splitting app three times. The line count difference? 75 vs. 281.
Compose Multiplatform 1.10.0
Elvira Mustafina from JetBrains just dropped Compose Multiplatform 1.10.0, and it's solving one of the most annoying pain points in cross-platform development. Three different @Preview annotations? Gone.
NavEntryScope: The missing scope in Android Hilt
Luca from Mercari's Logistics team hit a wall: multiple ViewModels on one screen needed to share data, but Hilt's built-in scopes forced them into Singleton hell with manual cleanup. So they built the...
Xcode 26: Enhanced Security for iOS Apps
Timothy Werquin from Guardsquare reveals why Apple's new Xcode 26 'enhanced security' features miss the most common iOS app threats. While exploit mitigation sounds impressive, the real danger lies elsewhere.
The Journey to Compose Hot Reload 1.0.0
Sebastian Sellmair and Azat Abdullin from JetBrains reveal how they built Compose Hot Reload 1.0.0—a zero-config tool that lets you update Kotlin UI code instantly while preserving app state. The engineering behind it is wild.
Building v0 iOS and Fixing React Native Along the Way
Building an AI-powered iOS app from scratch sounds exciting until you hit React Native's rough edges. The v0 iOS team found plenty of them.
Agent Skills explained: Replacing AGENTS.md with reusable AI knowledge
Antoine van der Lee reveals why he ditched AGENTS.md files across all his projects. The replacement? A reusable AI knowledge system that's already supported by Cursor, Claude, and Gemini.