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Would it be nice to have unique push notification sounds for your app? When you have a unique sound, users can quickly differentiate it from other notifications. Adding custom sound is really easy with Appery.io – upload a custom sound file to your Appery.io app and then specify its name on the push notifications page. Currently, the feature is available for iOS apps only. You can find more about the custom sounds and a lot of other useful information on push notifications in our documentation.

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Update fast without going through the app store

Wouldn’t it be awesome to update your app without having to resubmit it to app stores? Now you can! With the new Appery.io AutoUpdate feature, you’ll only have to submit your app to the app stores once. You’ll use EXPORT > Auto update to build a new bundle with updated resources. Apps installed on devices will automatically download the updated bundle, meaning users won’t need to do anything for the update.

However, there are some restrictions due to security policies:

• Only web-resources: HTML/JS/CSS resources could be updated with this feature;
• Cordova and Cordova plugins couldn’t be updated with this feature;

The updated release bundle is the same for all platforms, so all mobile devices (Android and iOS) are updated simultaneously. See the documentation for more about this feature.

New API Express capabilities

Quickly create services with new visual builder

API Express, which allows you to use external relational databases with Appery.io, was updated with powerful visual tools. Now it’s really easy to build complex algorithms by combining multiple queries into one endpoint.

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Are you looking for a convenient place to keep data that may be accessed from any screen of your app? Appery.io has you covered. Use the Settings Service to keep any data you need to quickly access from anywhere in your app. The Settings Service has its own API. so it’s easy to manage programmatically. Use it for static values such as URLs and IDs and for dynamic values such as device language or dates. But, beware of keeping sensitive information there such as session tokens.

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AngularJS provides many useful tools for easy app development, including the concept of directives. When building an AngularJS mobile app with Appery.io, you can easily write any custom directive you want to extend the behavior of HTML. Appery.io even provides two of it’s own built-in directives you can use: navigateTo and backButton. The first one helps navigate between app pages; the second one helps manage your browser history including making the back button behave more intuitively.

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Appery.io is the best mobile app development platform out there, but, with so much in Appery.io, it’s important you get the help you need to take full advantage of the platform. One way we do this is through frequent webinars and now with our office hours. We’ve lined up a bunch into December. Next office hours: this Thursday; next webinar (Testing and App Sharing Using the Appery.io Tester App): September 23rd.

In this post you are going to learn how to access images uploaded to a cloud database via REST APIs and display the images in the app. This is the second post about working with images. You can read the first post here:

Quickly Upload, Display, and Customize Images from the Database with the Built-in Files Collection.

Let’s say you have a list of images, icons, or avatars that you have uploaded to a database. Maybe you are building a contacts app and would like to display employee head shot or just a list of products. Now you would like to display them in your app. In this tutorial we are going to show you how to do that — it’s fast and simple.

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Virtually any mobile app needs to store data. The Appery.io platform offers an integrated cloud-based database for storing any app data. Every database that you create comes with a number of collections predefined. The collections are:

• Users – for user management.
• Files – for storing binary data such as images and other files.
• Devices – for sending targeted push messages.
• Customer collection – any number of custom collections that you need in your app.

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Most popular modern apps require an internet connection to a server to operate fully. Sometimes, though, devices are going  to be disconnected, so an app needs to be able to “catch up” with the server when it’s reconnected. Incorporating this synchronization into your app is important for attracting more users. With the help of Appery.io API Express and its offline mode, you can do exactly that! As part of this feature, there are a variety of different methods available to handle all the details like switching between online and offline modes, triggering the synchronization, and resetting data that fails to synchronize.

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When you create a new Ionic/AngularJS app in Appery.io, every app has two pages out-of-the-box. index is the main template page and Screen1 is a page that uses the template. Any other pages that you create will use the index template page. Most pages in your app will have a header. If you open Screen1 or any other page, you will see that it doesn’t have a header area. That’s how it supposed to be since the index template has the common header. You can set a static page title in the index page but then you will have the same page header on all other pages. Most likely you want to the page header to change on different pages. We are going to show you how to do that in an AngularJS app.

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Slowness is the ultimate user experience killer for apps. A good way to make your apps faster is to boost screen loading speed. “Minification” helps this by removing all unnecessary characters from screen code without changing the functionality. You can easily add minification to your AngularJS apps in Appery.io with the Grunt JS Task Runner. Then, you can easily customize the minification process through configuration or by adding third-party modules.

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