A brief background
As per the latest announcement, Apple App Store will not accept new applications using UIWebView after April 2020 and will stop supporting existing apps from December 2020.
This majorly impacts all the hybrid applications developed using Ionic and Cordova framework as they use UIWebView during compilation to run native code.
What does this announcement mean for healthcare organizations?
Healthcare organizations often employ mHealth applications for patient collaboration, care management, regulatory compliance management, and similar operations. As always, the cost of a potential failure of such an application is very high in the healthcare context and needs to be prevented at the earliest.
Any mHealth applications using Cordova / Ionic framework should be updated before Dec 2020 to avoid issues/failures on iOS devices with version iOS 12 & above.
If your organization uses any such mHealth application, it necessitates an urgent need to change the underlying technology to ensure long term utilization of the application.
Enterprises need an approach that will implement changes and migrate to new APIs without comprising & affecting several users using the current version of app. It also needs to ensure backward compatibility, safeguard local data saved on the user’s device, confirm platform support, and finally successfully execute current automation test cases, security & performance of the app.
What are the likely problems you will encounter?
Planning for the next steps
It is apparent that any mHealth application using UIWebView is ‘living on borrowed time’. Diligent business leaders need to plan for the next steps and transition to a long-term solution.
Instead, these are the questions that need to be pondered upon:
Final Thoughts
Deprecation issues need to be handled and manage without neglecting the stability and performance of the mHealth a
CitiusTech Mobile team has the expertise & has a well-defined approach for fixing the issues caused due to deprecations in a time frame of 3 to 6 months based on the effort required to make changes on current functionalities. To know more about our healthcare-specific mobile health practice visit here.