Wear OS Gets New, More Efficient Text-to-Speech Engine

Google has announced a new text-to-speech engine for Wear OS, its Android variant aimed at smartwatches and other wearables, supporting over 50 languages and faster than its predecessor thanks to using smaller ML models.

How Lyft Leveraged iOS Live Activities to Enhance User Experience

Providing timely updates to users is key to improving their mobile experience, explains Lyft iOS engineer Max Husar, although it will increase development scope and effort. To achieve a balance between flexibility, reliability, and reusability, Lyft engineers used iOS ActivityKit to add dynamic content to their app.

Swift Asynchronous Programming Recipes on GitHub

Swift developer Matt Massicotte, formerly at Crashlytics and Apple, has recently launched a GitHub repo collecting a number of useful recipes to make it easier to use Swift concurrency and solve recurrent problems, while being aware of the most common traps you can fall into.

Meta Shares its Mixed-Reality Meta Horizon OS to Third Parties

Opening up the operating system that powers its Meta Quest devices to third-party hardware makers, Meta aims to create a larger ecosystem and make it easier for developers to create apps for larger audiences.

Jetpack Compose Extends Transitions and Animations, and Improves Performance

The latest release of Jetpack Compose, announced at Google I/O 2024, brings several extensions, including support for shared element transitions, lazy list item animations, improved performance, and more.