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Appery.io recently announced another great feature that significantly simplifies app versions publishing. By using the AutoUpdate feature, you can make changes to the published app without submitting it to app stores. Go to EXPORT > Auto update after you’ve made changes, and Appery.io will generate a bundle with the updated resources. Apps installed on devices will automatically download the updated bundle, so users don’t need to do anything for the update. You can read more about the AutoUpdate feature in our documentation.

Make sure to check out all our mobile development tips.

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our free plan.

 About the App

Shaun Summers is a developer who leveraged the Appery.io platform to build an attractive and functional app. A B2B Marketing Director by day and “a technophile by night,” Summers designed an app to help people collect information about their clothing size in order to simplify clothing shopping.

The app is aimed at busy people that like clothes but have little time to go shopping and/or find little pleasure in the process of trying them on. The idea is to allow these individuals to accumulate some knowledge of their sizes for different brands so that they may confidently buy without trying the item on in the future.

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Appery.io Charts plugin

From talking with developers who are building business and enterprise apps, we’ve heard that displaying data visually with charts is one of the highest priority requirements. To make it easy to visualize data, Appery.io has introduced a lightweight plugin that has everything you need to add pretty and inform-dense charts to your mobile app.

In this post we’ll show you how to do exactly that.

The Appery.io Charts plugin is available for AngularJS types of apps – both Ionic and Bootstrap. It’s built on the popular Chart.js library and consists of two JavaScript and one CSS asset. It can be added to your app the same as any other Appery.io plugin:

1. Open your Appery.io app and go to CREATE NEW > From plugin.
2. Choose Appery.io Charts and click Import selected plugins.
3. All the assets and the charts page will be added to your app.

Now you can go to Project > Routing and set the Default route for charts page to make this the initial page for your app.

There are three type of charts implemented in this plugin – Line, Bar and Radar. Switch them and see the animation by clicking the appropriate buttons.

Chart.js supports many other chart types, you can learn about the other charts here.

In this plugin, charts are displayed based on the data stored locally, in the scope variable. However, you may want to use a database as the data source for your charts. It will take less than a minute to configure the plugin in this way. Read the plugin documentation to see how.

Hopefully you will find this easy-to-use plugin useful. If you have any suggestions on how to make it better – feel free to contact us!

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.

Check all the mobile development tips.

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our free plan.

This short video shows how to run and test your hybrid app without going through the app store.

In this video you will learn:

• How to extend your app with plugins
• How to add a plugin that uploads a photo to a database
• How to run and test the app using the Appery.io Tester app for iOS or Android
• How to do remote debugging with Weinre
• How to share your app with anyone without the app store — even if they don’t have an Appery.io account

If you like this, start building apps fast with Appery.io, it’s free.

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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If you signed up for Appery.io before September 2014, you might have used our old App Builder. If your app uses the old App Builder, then you will see a message like this:

Upgrade message if your app uses the old App Builder

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When you are building a mobile app in Appery.io, you are starting with HTML/JavaScript app which then can be packaged as a Cordova (PhoneGap) app, published and installed on a device. You can also use any Cordova APIs in your app and add any 3rd party Cordova plugins.

Everyone knows that testing is one of the most important steps when building a mobile app and also the part that usually takes the most time. Luckily there is a very fast way you can test your app, and I’ll show you how to do it.

When you are working on an app inside the Appery.io App Builder, you are seconds away from testing your app. Simply click the “Test” button in the toolbar:

App Builder for Ionic

When you click the “Test” button, a new browser tab will open where the app will be loaded. It looks like this:

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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.

Tell me more.

For more tips…

Last week we blogged about an AngularJS issue that breaks some APIs when you upgrade to iOS 9. We showed you how to create a patch. Today, we have added a plug-in that makes fixing this even faster and simpler. Import the plug-in, and you’re done. I’ll show you how to do that.

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