On 13th June, at their World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote, Apple announced quite a number of exciting innovations including the announcement of iOS 10 and WatchOS 3. iOS 10 and WatchOS 3 provide developers many new APIs and features to build innovative and exciting new phone, tablet, and watch applications.

You can be assured that with Kony, your mobile app is taken care of! Under our unique SLA, we contractually commit to providing you app compatibility support for updated OS releases within 30 business days. Having said that, we target providing same day iOS compatibility aligned with Apple’s iOS general availability for our platform. 

This isn’t just for major releases though, as Kony also helps ensure your app is covered for other key changes to Apple’s app requirements or submission policies.  For example, last month Apple unexpectedly announced changes to require new IPV6 support and also made a major change to their architecture model to make Apple Watch standalone from their iOS phone app.  In both cases, Kony had you covered and rapidly updated our platform and tools to support these new requirements and deliver peace of mind that your apps will pass the latest Apple app store requirements. With our powerful omni-channel platform capabilities, Kony ensured that our customers were readily compatible; thereby saving them many additional development hours that a native application or any other development platform would have required.  Again, another advantage that Kony is proud to provide to our customers.

But let’s dive into the WWDC news…  The big news of course was all about iOS10 updates.  If you are currently on a supported platform version of Kony Visualizer and Kony MobileFabric™ (version 6.0 or higher), Kony will ensure your app has iOS 10 compatibility per our standard SLA.   

This year Apple opened up many new OS features to its developers. Support for these new features will only be available on the latest version of the Kony platform so begin making plans to upgrade if you want to take advantage of Apple’s latest innovative new features.  Here is a brief summary of what’s coming in iOS10:

• Using extensions, Apple has opened up new APIs for interacting with Siri, iMessages, and Apple maps. They have opened up the SiriKit framework for Siri and extensions for Apple Maps and iMessages.
• Apple has added a new framework for user notifications. They have also opened up developer access to a UI notification framework allowing developers to customize the notifications.
• They have announced enhancements across other APIs, like Apple Pay, 3D touch, speech recognition, spotlight, and proactive suggestions.
• Apple has also introduced updates to its security and enhancements to privacy. Apart from the updates, Apple has also mandated the use of the ATS (app transport security) security protocol beginning in 2017.
• Apart from the iOS updates, Apple also announced WatchOS 3 with updates to the watch app performance, background tasks, and several new Watch APIs.

These new developer features represent a very exciting set of new application experiences that you can deliver to your customers.  Kony is now in the process of evaluating the new iOS10 & WatchOS 3 developer releases across the Kony Mobility Platform (inclusive of Kony Visualizer and Kony MobileFabric).  It is our intent to provide 100% support for these new APIs as part of an upcoming new Fall release. After we have completed analysis on the developer release, we will share in the near future a schedule of the planned beta drops of Kony compatible releases (so that you can begin validating your apps) and final GA timeframe based on Apple’s timelines and their release schedule.   

As always, Kony is committed that our apps follow the best practices in security and ensure the best in class security across the application development landscape. Based on this, in our upcoming releases, we will ensure the application compatibility with the new ATS security protocol requirements along with enhancements to other security APIs.

If you have any questions about your applications, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your Customer Success team representatives or Kony Support.