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Top Mobile Applications on Google Play in 2022
The Google Play Store started as Android Market on the 22nd of October, 2008, with only thirteen applications. To compare, there will be over 2.68 million apps in the Store in 2022. Nevertheless, such an overwhelming number of games and apps is absolutely confusing for users. Finding the ideal software for business or play may take time. Even the best programs may be identified afterwards. That is why Google decided on the “Best Of” awards in 2016 to draw users’ attention to clearly outstanding top mobile applications and games. The award nomination tasks imply the users’ direct participation in defining books, TV shows, movies, and apps. Play Store editors can also make up their own lists. As a result, the mixture of expert and consumer opinions does not allow the public to skip truly valuable new developments. Developers of all levels have also got an opportunity to be recognized. They are rewarded for their creativity and unique skills implemented in the most sophisticated and well-appreciated top applications for mobile. Therefore, it's the 10th anniversary of the Google Play launch, celebrated in 2022. It was in 2012 when Google Play united different categories and platforms under one roof. They were Google Music, Google Market, Google Movies, and other applications meant for the entertainment industry. This year, Google Play’s Users’ Choice awards marked the most appreciated and trending users’ content. The winner was selected via a very simple process. Compatible devices allowed users to log in and browse content. Voting took place from November 1-14. Results were released on November 30. Best Applications for Chromebook, Best Continuing, Best Narrative, and more were introduced this year by Google. It also removed such categories as Popular on Google TV and Game Changers. They also altered their procedure for the winner presentation. Now, Google announces one winner in each category and makes honorable mentions of the apps that are truly worth your attention. Here, we want to consider the top mobile applications on Google Play awarded in 2022. Gaming apps are usually ranked at the top among all Android applications due to the revenue they provide. By September 2022, they accounted for the 7th top position out of 10 other spots. Play Store editors have decided on the winner of the Best Game of 2022 award, and Google has defined the Users’ Choice Game of 2022. Let’s look at the results. Apart from game app solutions for Android, Google decided to make a choice of the best applications related to physical and mental healthcare, self-education, planning, and personal growth. These apps are appreciated for their creativity and a strong vibe of “know yourself” and “develop yourself” messages. Google has paid more attention to apps that care about users in their everyday life. Therefore, the Google Play market has chosen the winners in eight other categories. They are the following. <b>1.</b> Best for Everyday Essentials: planners, trackers, calming helpers, and plant monitoring software. Plant Parent is a winner here, and Daily Diary, Book Morning Routine Waking Up, and Sleep Tracker are mentioned as honorable. <b>2.</b> Best Hidden Gems: apps meant for social media, recovery, and meal planning. Recover Athletics is a winner, and Wamble, Little Lunches, and Linktree are honorable nominates. <b>3.</b> Best Apps for Good: meditation, mental health, and digital well-being. The STIGMA App is a winner, and Zario and Sleep Fruits have become nominates. <b>4.</b> Best Apps for Wear OS: it is the Android system for smartwatches and other wearable devices. Todoist is the best app in this category. <b>5.</b> Best for Personal Growth: apps for focusing attention, learning languages, calming down, self-improvement, and learning how to play musical instruments. The winner this year is Breathwrk, and the nominates are Ukulele by Yousician, Duolingo ABC, and Gym Log & Workouts. <b>6.</b> Best Apps for Fun: you can find apps for entertainment, workouts, and note-taking in this category. The winner is PetStar, and honorable mentions are given to Note It Widget and DanceFitMe. <b>7.</b> Best Apps for Tablets: the category includes examples of apps developed uniquely for use on tablets. Pocket is a winner here. <b>8.</b> Best Apps for Chromebooks: it is a new category for nominating apps developed specifically for Chromebooks. BandLab is a winner here. You need to know that applications developed for everyday use require great functionality and high-quality UI and UX design, with an attractive appearance and user-friendly interface. The winners meet all these demands. The winner chosen by Google Play for everyday use is Dream by WOMBO. This application is meant for the creation of pieces of art. It uses artificial intelligence, and everyone can use it to create masterpieces in different art styles based on keywords and reference images. The AI combines the entered data to release a completely unique picture. The best apps of 2022 chosen by users include Dream by WOMBO, Ukulele by Yousician, Sleep Tracker, DanceFitMe, PicCollage, Note It Widget, Daily Diary, Breathwrk, and Be Real. Be Real is a great way to share bright experiences, travels, and memories with your loved ones in real-time.
Payment Gateway Integration in Mobile Application
No matter what kind of application you are developing for mobile devices - be it an e-commerce, music streaming, or travel app - you need to provide your customers with the opportunity to pay for goods or services they have chosen. Most payments nowadays are made via mobiles. It concerns retail sales, customer services, or any other types of merchandise. The customer experience has to be smooth here to provide sustainably high conversions to your business. Statistics argue that about 55 percent of all sales were made online in 2021, and this amount is continuously increasing. Therefore, your company’s mobile app has to integrate a convenient and easy-to-use mobile payment processing gateway. We are not speaking now about the in-app buys of digital products. Most of them are performed via Google Play Store for Android or Apple’s App Store for iOS. These well-appreciated and massive platforms have their own software and solutions for meeting all their purposes. This article explains how to incorporate online payment gateways in your company mobile app to purchase real items and services like T-shirts, hotel rooms, and train tickets. You also need to know the most popular payment gateway providers and how to pick the best one for credit card payment Android or iOS integration. Let us introduce this technology that helps make debit or credit card payments on mobile phones or websites. It is essential for your company’s extension and increasing revenue, too. Understanding how it works is important to make the right decisions on how to improve your business performance in this way. A payment gateway collects financial information from customers with the help of the frontend development in your mobile application and transfers it to the payment processor or bank that is meant to accept this payment. Such transactions should be safe and secure, so making mobile app payment integration protected is one of the most essential tasks of all experienced developers. The e-commerce payment gateways work in the following way: <b>1.</b> A buyer chooses a product or service and adds it to the shopping cart on the online store or service-providing website. <b>2.</b> The cart is connected to a specific payment gateway service that asks the user to provide credit card information. <b>3.</b> The user fills in the information and checks out. <b>4.</b> The gateway sends this request to the bank that has issued the card. <b>5.</b> The bank approves the transaction, and the payment is transferred to your company’s merchant account. A merchant account is a very important part of the entire transaction alongside the gateway service provider. You need to choose the type that best suits your commercial needs and security purposes. There are two basic types of merchant accounts - dedicated and aggregated ones. Hence, let’s look at both of them in detail. All gateway providers, such as PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, and others, are interested in the best functionality of both a gateway and a merchant account. The latter is the place where the money should be transferred after the customer’s payment was approved and stored there until it is transferred to your bank account. Therefore, a merchant account is not a bank account. It is meant for sales and payments and accumulating money from them. Only after the payment arrives at your merchant account and is not withdrawn, it can be transferred to your bank account. You may wonder why this additional layer is needed. The most essential reason here is that your customer may want to return an item or refuse the service and ask for a refund. You can make this refund easily from the costs accumulated in the merchant account. All other accumulated costs will be sent to your bank account. Therefore, you need step-by-step integration of merchant in-app payment to ensure it works smoothly. A dedicated merchant account is made specifically for your business, so you can directly control all the financial operations. It also allows you to correct errors occurring in transactions or debit the costs if you have to pay back a refund. All the transfers will be faster - you can complete them within a day. However, you will need to pay more for opening and maintain such an account. That is why many businesses prefer to open aggregated accounts. They are more extended because they collect funds for multiple merchants. Such an account is less expensive, and you can receive approval for its opening within only 24 hours, while it will take you a few days to approve a dedicated account. In addition, an aggregated account does not require as much KYC (Know Your Customer) documentation as a dedicated account does. Anyway, the choice is yours, and you have to consider all pros and cons of both variants.
Best Material Design UI Component Libraries
When we speak about material design, we mean the specific design system developed by Google. Web designers and developers can create apps for different platforms that have a crisp and high-quality look on all of them. The set of material design principles was developed, and now all professionals who deal with web design follow them to make their apps more beautiful and consistent. All devices and operating systems showcase these apps in the same way due to the material design toolkit officially accepted by Google. It can provide developers with many helpful assets, such as color palettes, icons, components, and guidelines. They make any web design look professional and unified. Nevertheless, the best material UI design examples contain something else that goes beyond the assets provided by Google. The matter is that third-party developers see their task as getting the most from the open-source nature of this project. It means that they have already started to develop their own instruments that comply with the basic material design principles from Google and efficiently complement them. Therefore, we have analyzed these brand-new developments and newly created libraries to help you choose the material design UI library that mostly accurately corresponds to all your development needs. If you are going to start a mobile or web app development project for your individual business needs, you will be able to make good use of them. Before you attempt to find the best material design UI for web applications, let’s recollect the most important principles of it developed by Google. You can consider the following: <b>1.</b> Choose the appropriate colors - they should show the components’ position, state, and relationships between their separate parts. <b>2.</b> The typical material color palette consists of two colors - a primary and a secondary one. <b>3.</b> Pick out the components that can be reused. <b>4.</b> Consider legibility standards for icons and texts. <b>5.</b> Ensure that all the icons have distinct edges and clean folds. <b>6.</b> Think about only the meaningful motions on the screen. You can also find other principles in Google’s guidelines, but the ones mentioned above are basic. If you want to obtain a highly functional material design system, look through these guidelines thoroughly. You don’t need to be an experienced material UI design expert to pick out the best solution. The UI component libraries for creating the material design will help you a lot to follow all of Google’s guidelines and requirements.
Best Code Editors for Web Developers
Have you found the best code editor to help your website build and save time and effort? If you are still in doubt, this article is right for you. A code editor for creating website designs is the most important tool for developers and web designers. That is why it needs to have all the features that are necessary at the moment to improve the quality of coding. Here are the best cross-platform code editors you can make use of. They can perform on three operating systems - OS X, Linux, and Windows. The developer’s working style and qualifications can influence a lot the choice of an editor. You can opt for one universal editor for different jobs. However, most programmers prefer to have several ones for every separate task. So, let’s have a closer look at the following cross-platform code editors and their characteristics. This review can help you make the right choice. This Microsoft’s cross-platform code can be used for all major operating systems. Visual Studio was developed on Atom’s components, but Microsoft has changed some initial solutions by removing some types of features and replacing them with others that are pretty brand-new. Its startup has become faster than Atom’s, and its performance is also quicker and smoother. The code is absolutely customizable. You can opt for different plugins and themes in the official marketplace and install them without effort from this editor. This code editor for website building has a range of cutting-edge features that can improve the coding process. One of the most important of them is the IntelliSense autocomplete feature. It offers many smart solutions to be applied to coding. The editor also has an excellent built-in debugger for debugging immediately from the editor. Another characteristic worth your attention is the default support of Git. You can implement various Git commands in a separate Git View. Therefore, among the advantages of this coding editor UI system, we can mention the following: ━ a built-in debugger; ━ a built-in Git View for proper Git integration; ━ absolute customization; ━ a perfect extension ecosystem; ━ the straightforward marketplace for smooth and easy use; ━ IntelliSense for automatic completion. In addition, this editor is open-source and free, so using it is very convenient. However, Visual Studio Code has some disadvantages, and one of them is confusing branding because its name is mistakenly associated with Visual Studio, though it has nothing to do with it.
Web Animation That You Can Use in Web Apps
Many app developers are true fans of creating animations for the web. The best examples of well-designed animations can make your apps significantly appealing. They can establish close connections between users and the content you offer them from the screen. You can make your web apps more user-friendly, entertaining, and attractive with different types of web animations. If you want to know more about how to create animations for websites and apps and get professional tips on what types of technology to choose from, continue reading this post. You are sure to like the idea of creating your web application with animation. The first thing to do is to look at the types of UI animations for web apps and learn how they can be used. <b><u>Animations for Loading</u></b> The main idea of applying animations to your web apps is to brighten up the waiting time while the application is loading. Sometimes, loading videos, maps, PDF files, tables, or website pages takes more time than users expected, so they bounce the site and may never come back to it. If you want to minimize the risks of bouncing, we offer a perfect solution - to create the feeling that the app is running very fast in your customers. You can apply any type of loading animations that are spinning, jumping, or disappearing. You can also think about short cartoons, shape-changing images, skeleton screens, and progress bars. Your users will be amused and impressed. They will eagerly come back to your site for these bright impressions. <b><u>Animations for Welcoming Purposes</u></b> If you want to make a positive impression on your website users, greeting animations will serve you well. They will entertain them and engage in using your site and its products again and again. Here are some examples of how to make web animations for welcoming purposes. <b>3D Animations</b> Complex visuals with realistic designs can attract more attention. There is a trend of mixing 2D and 3D items in animation-powered web design development nowadays. It produces deeper and more engaging experiences. Interactive 3D animations are also widely used. They can react to finger movements on mobiles or buttons, mouse, and key clicks. They are also perfect decorative elements placed on the main page to entertain users from the very first minutes on the site. You may also think about redesigning your website. Adding creative 3D animations will freshen it up and make the interface look stunning. <b>Particle Animations</b> Users will feel more relaxed when these animations are on the web app’s homepage. Particle animations can be non-interactive and interactive. The task of interactive pieces is to respond to the cursor’s movements in real-time. Users can be literally hypnotized when they see that they can control the animation on the web page. Non-interactive animations are also useful because they can be placed in the background, even if a user cannot control them. The category of particle animations involves typography (or typo) animations. They feature moving letters and can be either interactive or non-interactive, too. <b>Background Video</b> The text can be supported by a silent background video that goes quite fast so that users can see it many times. It creates an effect of immersion, and users may decide to spend more time on the page to see its details. <b><u>Scrolling Animation Opportunities</u></b> If you want to add to users’ control and interactive design of your web app, a proper choice of scrolling animations will help a lot. You can opt for background changes, one-page scrolling, or a scroll drawing. Depending on your app's purpose and design, experienced developers can offer you some other variants. Such additions perform due to the same principle - a user scrolls a page up or down, and the picture moves accordingly. <b><u>The Use of Image Galleries</u></b> You can tell your users a fascinating story by using multiple images on the same screen in the form of a slideshow or a carousel. This way of creating animations for the web will also help save space on the site. Putting these images in an appropriate order can explain how the web app works, what your business is aimed at, and how the company came to be. Or you can represent your best products and offers to make them more attractive to potential customers. If you set a specific direction for those image carousels or slideshows, your users will be interested in utilizing other elements of the website. <b><u>What Is Sidebar Navigation?</u></b> It is vertical sliding navigation that helps create an understandable and compact web app interface. These tiny animated icons standing for the menu points will always be visible and easy to reach. Users can access the parts of such a web application with animation without scrolling the page. <b><u>Helpful Visual Feedback</u></b> These extremely helpful animations aim to show users whether they do everything correctly on the app. There are two types of visual feedback animations - warning and hover effect ones. <b>Warning Animations</b> Using these animations is the best solution for telling users that they are performing something incorrectly. For example, asking to repeat an action or avoiding clicking the button once again will help to fill in the field one more time if something has gone wrong or choose another button to complete the action. Professional developers can offer you different shapes of warning animations, like sad emojis, red crosses, or other unique signs, to let users know about their invalid actions. <b>Hover Effect Animations</b> The hover effects are used to show users whether the items they want to access are clickable. Such animations are used in the buttons that may show hints, change shapes or colors, or simply light up. Hover animations are also used to inform customers that their actions were completed successfully. This type can also be used for mobile applications as one of the most effective solutions. Talk to your developer to find the most creative way to apply them in your mobile app. <b><u>What About Storytelling?</u></b> A good example of a storytelling solution is an animation that represents the creation of a landscape design for your new house’s backyard. Instead of reading a lengthy text, your customer will see the entire process. Such a way of idea presentation is pretty informative, quick, and understandable. Users will absorb all the information you want to convey to them very fast and effectively.
Building an E-Prescription Solution
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the attitudes toward paper document management in healthcare. Electronic management of medical documentaries is gaining more and more popularity nowadays. Modern technologies can minimize the contact between doctors and patients to avoid infection. Though, medicine prescription software is not only about that. The solution allows for improving the quality of medical care by avoiding bad errors related to the human factor. The matter is that medication errors are one of the most widespread causes of side effects in modern medicine. More than 100,000 hospitalizations are reported due to suspected prescription errors in the USA every year. A lot of deaths in hospitals are also linked to such errors. Doctors’ prescription software can minimize these risks. E-prescribing apps also known as eRx software can become an essential part of the healthcare industry. This app development results in minimizing daily challenges and hazardous risks for patients, pharmacies, and physicians. This article considers the key benefits of e-prescription software and explains how such apps actually work. Up to 2020, about 85 percent of healthcare providers had switched to eRx software, and it is very good news. However, some developers don’t care much about the app’s design and interface. Such poorly implemented applications can also be harmful. Medical practitioners are seeking replacements for them if they do not want them properly, so they turn back to paper prescriptions. That results in errors, lack of safety, and loads of paperwork. The software for doctor prescriptions was developed to facilitate the prescription process and avoid mixing up drug names, forms, and dosages. It can also reduce the number of phone calls from patients and pharmacies to confirm prescriptions or ensure their correctness. It will lead to a better workflow and increased productivity of pharmacy workers. Patient satisfaction will also grow. Let’s consider the main benefits the eRx software can provide. <b><u>Clinical Decision Support</u></b> No clinician can keep all drug names and related information in mind. Moreover, many medications come in different forms and doses. A doctor should also be careful about side effects, allergies, and drug interactions. E-prescription applications for Android and iOS allow a physician to read instructions attentively and without any rush. It also helps to speed up the process of filling prescriptions. Such an app has a drop-down list and default instructions for patients on how to take the preparation. The app also has access to patients’ historical data and medical charts. So, the system can offer support in making a decision considering dangerous doses, contraindications, possible side effects, and duplicate preparations. <b><u>Avoiding Lost or Unfilled Prescriptions</u></b> No therapist can follow a patient while they are filling prescriptions, buying drugs, and taking them. Patients can lose paper prescriptions, forget to buy medications, or refuse to take them. That is why more than 20 percent of paper prescriptions usually go unfilled. The application allows doctors to track such prescriptions and remind their clients that they should buy and take medications. The app has a special built-in chat for it. Pharmacists can also follow the frequency of filling in prescriptions for controlled drugs. It allows tracking possible drug abuse. <b><u>Prescribing Controlled Substances Has Become Easier</u></b> E-prescribing apps for iPhone and Android are connected to the database of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP). It allows for checking the patient’s use of controlled substances. It can prevent the growth of opioid-related addiction or abuse. Drug-seekers cannot change prescriptions anymore, and doctors cannot buy controlled drugs for illegal purposes. <b><u>Refilling Prescriptions Faster</u></b> Doctors and healthcare staff think refilling prescriptions be a huge workload. ERX software allows patients to get their prescriptions refilled much faster and more conveniently. Clinicians also find it easier to refill urgent prescriptions. All in all, the possibility to avoid bad prescription errors is one of the most essential benefits, too. When a physician has easy access to the patient’s prescription history, they can check it for diagnoses, allergies, contraindications, weight, age, and other important indices. So, they can avoid prescribing improper medications or duplicate preparations. Healthcare providers can also pick up a more affordable drug option if a patient needs it. The application can even give access to insurance benefits information. That is why mobile development specialists are looking for new updates and tools to integrate their medicine prescription software with other systems.