Problem At my current client we have been heavily investing in UI tests. We make extensive use of Firebase TestLab to run our instrumented tests twice a day. Until recently we ran our UI tests without the need for any mocking. This also meant we have huge maintenance to keep the pipeline…

I switched work recently. Fortunately for me it was close to a train station so I decided to go by train from now on. To get to the nearest train station (which is only 3km) I decided to buy a bike. Since I’m a (bit of a) nerd 🤓 …

A retrospective overview of how we recreated the VRT NWS app in Flutter. — VRT NWS is part of Belgium’s national media VRT. The VRT NWS brand serves as their news app. On a daily basis it serves 350,000 active users. Which means it is in the top 10 news apps in Belgium. Analytics showed the future is in mobile and our stakeholders decided…

Do you want to know how you can run Dart code — even when your app is not in the foreground? — We are in the process of porting the VRT NWS app to Flutter. Our app consists of multiple news feeds with various contents: Headlines Recent news Popular news When a user opens the app, the user quickly wants to get the latest news. Besides performing a network call when the feed…

How we managed to make our notification stand out from the crowd — Our VRT NWS app is in big competition with other news apps to grab your daily need for news. One effective approach to lure users is by using push notifications. Every time a push is sent we see a huge influx on our dashboards. Besides the content, the way a…

At VRT we have always had a focus on accessibility. So it came only natural to us to give the same treatment to our mobile applications. This devotion from our mobile team did not go unnoticed. …

Every time I open the PocketCast app I can’t help but repeatedly click on the play button to gaze at this wonderful animation. Google even decided to place this particular animation in their Material Design Specs Transforming the play button to a pause button signifies that the two actions are…