👨💻 HMS Core: What have we done in the first half of 2022?
Hello all!
We are the HMS Core Cross-Platform Plugin team from Turkey! We develop cross-platform plugins for HMS Core in 4 different platforms: React Native, Cordova, Xamarin and Flutter. On regular basis, we release the packages of that month’s scope on npm, nuget and pub.dev.
Starting from this article, we will be posting the updates of the cross-platform plugins monthly on behalf of HMS Core.
In general, HMS Core plugins for cross platforms are published on npm, nuget and pub. You can easily access them for each platform with the following links:
- npm for the React Native, Cordova and Ionic Native plugins
- nuget for the Xamarin plugins
- pub for the Flutter plugins
Summary of the first half of the year
In spite of we only release packages monthly by covering all the features of the native HMS Core SDKs from the very beginning of HMS Core history, this year, we have added patch releases to our release scope for the developers who use our plugins in their apps so that they wouldn’t get affected from the problem about their app is not compliant with Google Play policies.
Let’s check the releases of last 6 months one by one.
January, 2022
We have updated Analytics Kit for both iOS and Android in three platforms: React Native, Cordova and Xamarin. With this version, we made a breaking change and according to the native SDK, to cover the new feature, a new method has been added to create a new HiAnalytics instance before tracking events.
In addition to those three platforms, in Flutter, we have updated Safety Detect with null-safety support and IAP Kit; covering all the new features as well.
February, 2022
In February, we have released 6 packages in different 4 platforms. Flutter Health and FIDO were published with null-safety-supported versions. So that we got 2 steps closer to make our all Flutter kits support null-safety. Awesome 🎉
March, 2022
When we came to March and the spring winds started to blow, we have updated Push Kits in all 4 platforms by covering all the features that were added to the Native Push SDK.
By the time we released the packages of March, we were informed that there has been a fix in all of the Native SDKs to solve the Google Play Store publishing issue that prevents the developers to release their apps due to being “not compliant with Google Play policies”.
Besides our monthly releases, we had to arrange a patch release to bump the versions to the latest versions since the problem had been resolved on the native side. We started bumping the versions by prioritizing the most-used packages. In patch releases we haven’t added any new features so that we could release them immediately and our developers could re-publish their apps without facing any further problem.
April Patch
Patch release of April was the first batch of the urgent updates. In addition to official release of April, we have added 19 different plugins, which we had updated from the beginning of the year, to this release. Shout-out to whole team for taking a quick action in a short period of time. 📢
April, 2022
Before the patch releases were arranged, April had been planned to update 5 different plugins to their latest versions. For the developers who were waiting for our plugin updates, we did not cancel the official release in spite of the intensity of the April patch release. Thus April went down in HMS Core’s history as the month that we published the most plugins with 26 packages.
May, 2022
Besides the official update of 7 plugins, urgent updates were taken place also in this month’s development scope. But it was decided to be published at the beginning of June.
This month, for React Native and Cordova platforms, we have published a new plugin, Ads Prime, that mimics the usage of the original Ads Kit, but removes some sensitive permissions and rectifies the risk of releasing apps integrated with the HUAWEI Ads SDK on Google Play.
June Patch
For the first time, instead of releasing the packages at the end of the month, we released the urgent patch plugins on June 10. Including the 12 plugins of this batch, in total, we have updated 31 plugins as the urgent patch.
June, 2022
When we came to the last month of the half year, similar to last month, the new plugin Ads Prime was also released for Xamarin and Flutter platforms. Considering the 3.x release of Flutter, all plugins were modified and tested according to the newest Flutter structure. Besides Flutter, the most used 3 plugins of Xamarin were also updated to the latest Native SDK versions.
Since Flutter is following a fast paced development, we will keep an eye on the updates and continue to test our plugins with the latest versions.
Have you seen us on Medium?
Did you know that we don’t develop only plugins, but also find use-cases and develop demo apps regarding to them? Then, we write Medium articles to help the developers how to integrate HMS Kits to their projects and use their features. Who could explain them better than the team which develops all those packages, right?
In that 6-month-period of time, 4 friends of our team published 4 different articles which are more informative than each other.
- Ugur developed a React Native app which is exactly alike Instagram homepage, and wrote an article about using Ads kit in this demo.
- Emre developed an event app with React Native and used three HMS Core kits in it: Location, Map and Push. He successfully explained how to combine different kits in a little demo app with his Medium post.
- Ozcan also published a Medium post about how he had added Account, Ads, and Map kits to his React Native demo app. He will also add new kits to the same app and publish a new post as Part 2!
- Sinem had an idea about using the Scan Kit in a Cafe app, which allows its customers to add balance to their account and pay their order via QR code. She developed this app with Flutter and published as a Medium post.
Each of them also contains GitHub links which you can access the source code of their demo projects. Don’t forget to clap the good work 😊
Besides our articles, you can also check other posts of Huawei which were written by developers under “Huawei Developers” Medium community.
Before saying goodbye, I would like to ensure you that you will be seeing us here more. We will update our packages every month and inform you monthly about the news and the breaking changes! (Future posts won’t be this long, I promise 🤞)
You can also follow our GitHub repositories. After each release, we update our packages with their demo applications.
In addition, if you run into a bug in our packages, do not hesitate to submit an issue to the related repository.
By the time you see us in the next post, take care of yourselves and keep following our plugins! Bye! 🙋♀️
