Author: Jackson Jiang

In the mobile Internet era, people are increasingly using mobile apps for a variety of different purposes, such as buying products online, hailing taxis, and much more. When using such an app, a user usually needs to manually enter their address for package delivery or search for an appropriate pick-up and drop-off location when they hail a taxi, which can be inconvenient.

To improve user experience, many apps nowadays allow users to select a point on the map and then use the selected point as the location, for example, for package delivery or getting on or off a taxi. Each location has a longitude-latitude coordinate that pinpoints its position precisely on the map. However, longitude-latitude coordinates are simply a string of numbers and provide little information to the average user. It would therefore be useful if there was a tool which an app can use to convert longitude-latitude coordinates into human-readable addresses.

During workouts, users expect to be able to track their status and data in real time within the health or fitness app on their phones. Huawei phone users can link a piece of equipment, like a treadmill or spinner bike, via the Huawei Health app, and start and track their workout within the app. As a fitness and health app developer, you can read activity records from the Huawei Health app, and display the records in your app. It is even possible to control the workout status directly within your app, and obtain real-time activity data, without having to redirect users to the Huawei Health app, which helps users conveniently track their workout and greatly enhances the user experience. Here is how.

HMS Core Health Kit provides a wide range of capabilities for fitness and health app developers. Its extended capabilities open up a wealth of real-time activity and health data and solutions specific to different scenarios. For example, after integrating the extended capabilities, you can call the APIs for starting, pausing, resuming, and stopping activities, to control activity status directly within your app, without redirecting users to the Huawei Health app. The Huawei Health app runs unobtrusively in the background throughout this entire process.

Personalized health records and visual tools have been a godsend for digital health management, giving users the tools to conveniently track their health on their mobile phones. From diet to weight and fitness and beyond, storing, managing, and sharing health data has never been easier. Users can track their health over a specific period of time, like a week or a month, to identify potential diseases in a timely manner, and to lead a healthy lifestyle. Moreover, with personalized health records in hand, trips to the doctor now lead to quicker and more accurate diagnoses. HMS Core Health Kit takes this new paradigm into overdrive, opening up a wealth of capabilities that can endow your health app with nimble, user-friendly features.
In this article, I will show you how to turn an app into a handy health assistant using Health Kit. The app will be able to obtain users' health data on the cloud from the Huawei Health app, after obtaining users' authorization, and then display the data to users. Hope you will find this helps.

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Nowadays, apps use device locations to provide a wide variety of services. You may want to see a user's location to show services around them, learn the habits of users in different areas, or perform location-based actions, like a ride-hailing app calculating travel distance and trip fare.

In order to protect user privacy, however, most apps request device location only when they run in the foreground. Once switched to the background, or even with the device screen turned off, apps are usually not allowed to request device location. As a result, they cannot record the GPS track of a device, which negatively affects the user experience of core functions of many apps, such as ride-hailing, trip-sharing, and exercise, all of which need to track location in real time.

Why Do I Need a Background Remover?

A background removal tool is not really a new feature, but rather its importance has grown as the world shifted over to online working and learning over the last few years. And I did not find how important this tool could be until just two weeks ago. On a warm, sunny morning with a coffee on hand, I joined an online conference. During this conference, one of my colleagues pointed out to me that they could see my untidy desk and an overflowing bin in the background. Naturally, this left me feeling embarrassed. I just wish I could travel back in time to use a background remover.

Now, I cannot travel in time, but I can certainly create a background removal tool. So, with this new-found motive, I looked online for some solutions and came across the body or head segmentation capability from HMS Core Video Editor Kit, and developed a demo app with it.

Emojis are a must-have tool in today's online communications as they help add color to text-based chatting and allow users to better express the emotions behind their words. Since the number of preset emojis is always limited, many apps now allow users to create their own custom emojis to keep things fresh and exciting.

For example, in a social media app, users who do not want to show their faces when making video calls can use an animated character to protect their privacy, with their facial expressions applied to the character; in a live streaming or e-commerce app, virtual streamers with realistic facial expressions are much more likely to attract watchers; in a video or photo shooting app, users can control the facial expressions of an animated character when taking a selfie, and then share the selfie via social media; and in an educational app for kids, a cute animated character with detailed facial expressions will make online classes much more fun and engaging for students.

Identity verification is among the primary contributors to mobile app security. Considering that face data is unique for each person, it has been utilized to develop a major branch of identity verification: face recognition.

Face recognition has been widely applied in services we use every day, such as unlocking a mobile device, face-scan payment, access control, and more. Undoubtedly, face recognition delivers a streamlined verification process for the mentioned services. However, that is not to say that this kind of security is completely safe and secure. Face recognition can only detect faces, and is unable to tell whether they belong to a real person, making face recognition vulnerable to presentation attacks (PAs), including the print attack, replay attack, and mask attack.

It can be so frustrating to lose track of a workout because the fitness app has stopped running in the background. It happens when you turn off the screen or have another app in the front to listen to music or watch a video during the workout. Talk about all of your sweat and effort going to waste!

Fitness apps work by recognizing and displaying the user's workout status in real time, using the sensor on the phone or wearable device. They can obtain and display complete workout records to users only if they can keep running in the background. Since most users will turn off the screen, or use other apps during a workout, it has been a must-have feature for fitness apps to keep alive in the background. However, to save battery power, most phones will restrict or even forcibly close apps once they are running in the background, causing the workout data to be incomplete. When building your own fitness app, it's important to keep this limitation in mind.

Travel and life vlogs are popular among app users: Those videos are telling, covering all the most attractive parts in a journey or a day. To create such a video first requires significant editing efforts to cut out the trivial and meaningless segments in the original video, which used to be a job for video editing pros.

This is no longer the case. Now we have an array of intelligent mobile apps that can help us automatically extract highlights from a video, so we can focus more on spicing up the video by adding special effects, for example. I opted to use the highlight capability from HMS Core Video Editor Kit to create my own vlog editor.

As online shopping for products and services becomes more and more popular, new business opportunities have also arisen. To seize such opportunities, I recently developed an online shopping app, which I shall refer to in this article as "app B". Once you have developed an app, the next thing that you need to do is to promote the app and attract more users to use it. Since sending push messages to users is a widely used method for promoting apps and improving user engagement, I decided to do the same for my new app in order to deliver promotional information and various coupons to users, which hopefully should increase their engagement and interest.

However, I discovered a glaring problem straightaway. Since the app has just been released, it has few registered users, making it hard to achieve the desired promotional effect by just sending push messages to these users. What I needed to do was to send push messages to a large pool of existing users in order to get them to try out my new app. It suddenly occurred to me that I once developed a very popular short video app (which I shall refer to as "app A"), which has now accumulated thousands of registered users. Wouldn't it be great if there was a one-stop service that I can use to get app B to send push messages to the wide user base of app A, thus attracting users of app A to use app B?

This, I think, is the very reason why templates are gaining popularity in text, image, audio, and video editing, and more. Of all these templates, video templates are probably the most in-demand by users. This is because a video is a lengthy creation that may also require high costs. And therefore, it is much more convenient to create a video using a template, rather than from scratch — which is particularly true for video editing amateurs.

The video template solution I have got for my app is a template capability of HMS Core Video Editor Kit. This capability comes preloaded with a library of templates that my users can use directly to quickly create a short video, make a vlog during their journey, create a product display video, generate a news video, and more.

Route planning is a very common thing that all of us do in our daily lives. Route planning in apps allows users to enter a location that they want to go to and then select an appropriate route based on various factors such as the estimated time of arrival (ETA), and is applicable to a wide range of scenarios. In a travel app, for example, travelers can select a starting point and destination and then select an appropriate route. In a lifestyle app, users can search for nearby services within the specified scope and then view routes to these service locations. In a delivery app, delivery riders can plan optimal routes to facilitate order pickup and delivery.

So, how do we go about implementing such a useful function in an app? That's exactly what I'm going to introduce to you today. 

Quick question: How many languages are there in the world? Before you rush off to search for the answer, read on.

There are over 7000 languages — astonishing, right? Such diversity highlights the importance of translation, which is valuable to us on many levels because it opens us up to a rich range of cultures. Psycholinguist Frank Smith said, "One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way."