Book excerpt: Learn how to make mobile native app development easier. If your team frequently works with both iOS and Android—or plans to transition from one to the other—this hands-on guide shows you how to perform the most common development tasks in each platform. Want to learn how to make network connections in iOS? Or how to work with a database in Android? This book has you covered. In the book’s first part, authors Shaun Lewis and Mike Dunn from O’Reilly’s mobile engineering group provide a list of common, platform-agnostic tasks. The second part helps you create a bare-bones app in each platform, using the techniques from part one. Common file and database operations Network communication with remote APIs Application lifecycle Custom views and components Threading and asynchronous work Unit and integration tests Configuring, building, and running an app on a device