Developing Mobile Applications in AEM

NOTE

Adobe recommends using the SPA Editor for projects that require single page application framework-based client-side rendering (e.g. React). Learn more.

AEM leverages Adobe PhoneGap and Adobe Publishing Solutions, allowing you to create and manage both content-rich and utility-based cross-platform mobile applications:

Manage all your companies mobile apps in one place.
Review apps in development and staging environments without the complexities of provisioning profiles and the extra effort to build and upload your app for sharing.
Use the AEM authoring environment to create and manage rich content for your apps.
Use the HTML5 with Adobe PhoneGap to create rich experiences with device-native capabilities.
Introduce HTML5 Webviews to new or pre-existing native applications through Cordova WebViews.
Create, curate and share rich multimedia content across all delivery channels including, web, mobile-web, mobile-app and print.

AEM integrates with the Adobe PhoneGap Build service to simplify the application build and deploy process.

Adobe ContentSync enables users to easily download page and content updates Over-the-Air (OTA) to their devices without having to re-install the application or download from the appStore, Google Play, or other app sources.

Adobe Analytics is fully integrated into AEM apps and allows detailed tracking of distribution, geolocation, operating systems, devices, click-streams, iBeacon tracking and more.

Creating Apps

Developers can use the AEM PhoneGap Starter Kit along with additional resources found in https://github.com/adobe-marketing-cloud-apps to bootstrap AEM apps with PhoneGap, including a reference native app running Cordova Webviews.

The readme for the Starter Kit Git repository includes a tutorial for using the starter kit:

Customize the branding
Maven sample build and deployment targets
Source control repository configuration
Install and deploy into local or remote AEM instances
Uninstall from AEM

NOTE

Additional reference implementation source, including labs, can be found on GitHub here and, the “kitchen-sink” source here.

Developing for IOS 9 and HTTP hosts

IOS developers should be aware of an open issue with Cordova apps running on iOS 9. This issue prevents requests from being made to insecure hosts (such as http://localhost:4502). This issue will be resolved with an upcoming release of cordova-ios (consumed by the Cordova CLI), but in the meantime there are two workarounds available:

As an immediate workaround, you can still use any of the iOS 8 simulators without issue.
If you must use iOS 9, your apps -Info.plist (found after running cordova platform add ios in “<app root>/platforms/ios/<app name>/<app name>-Info.plist”) file can be manually edited to include the following property:

<key>NSAppTransportSecurity</key>

<dict>

<key>NSAllowsArbitraryLoads</key> <true/>

</dict>

NOTE

For more detail on “App Transport Security”, see the following section of Apple’s iOS9 prerelease docs and this Stack Overflow discussion.