Stack Overflow wants developers to be able to check their coding projects quickly and on the go, so the online programming community launched a new mobile application for both iOS and Android, allowing developers to view, answer, post and vote on Stack Overflow questions.
Both operating system versions are available; however, the Android app is currently in beta. All of the functionality works but the team is making a few tweaks to the user interface, according to a Stack Overflow blog post.
The Stack Overflow app not only lets developers read, ask, answer, comment, flag and vote on questions, but also draft questions on the go and get push notifications when someone answers or comments on a question.
For developers that already have the Stack Exchange app, the Stack Overflow app has one key difference, and that is it contains Stack Overflow questions and answers. The existing Stack Exchange app and the Stack Overflow app will deliver notifications split in two, so all notifications will appear separately and delivered in their respective application.
Besides announcing its new application, Stack Overflow decided to dig into the history of mobile app development by using its recently released Stack Overflow Trends tool, which lets them examine what mobile-related technologies have been growing or shrinking in developer activity.
According to their findings, the notable shift for Android development started with the introduction of the Android Studio IDE in 2013, which became the most asked-about tags related to the platform, said Stack Overflow.
While iOS and Android received a lot of traction among app developers, Blackberry and Windows phones lagged behind. Stack Overflow also wrote that there are several increasingly popular tools for developing cross-platform applications that are deployed on both Android and iOS.
Another shift that Stack Overflow found interesting was between two back-end-as-a-service products used with applications, Firebase and Parse. According to a post by David Robinson, a data scientist at Stack Overflow, Facebook announced it was shutting down the Parse platform in 2016, and the questions on Parse within Stack Overflow dropped immediately. Later, Google launched an expanded version of the Firebase platform, and “the number of developers asking questions about it skyrocketed,” wrote Robinson.
