Maximo Anywhere 7.6.3 - Using the Play and iOS App Store applications

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I'm going to follow up my last blog on the Split Pane UI to talk quickly about how to make use of the Google Play Store and iOS App Store Maximo Anywhere applications with Maximo Anywhere 7.6.3.  The reason I'm writing this blog is in the past with other releases of 7.6.2 we had to ensure that the MobileFirst versions were the same between what the user was building the artifacts with and the version used to build the application store apps. 

For this reason customers MobileFirst versions were kept at the following levels. 

iOS Application Store: MobileFirst 7.1.0.00-20160726-1659

Google Play Store:   MobileFirst 7.1.0.00-20171101-1704

Now with Maximo Anywhere 7.6.3 this is no longer a requirement and the version of MobileFirst bundled with Anywhere 7.6.3 can be used to direct update applications from both stores.  Also the manual edits required to the application descriptor and build.properties to set your internal version to 7.6.2 are also no longer required  as this is now all automated. 

If you want to use  Maximo Anywhere 7.6.3 and direct update only the application store apps you just need to run the build mobilefirst target.  This with automatically update your files to set the internal build to match the application store apps and upload the web artifacts (.wlapp) to the MobileFirst server.  When your device connects with the app store applications using the connection settings pointing to your MobileFirst server the changes will be pushed to the device.  

If you want to use native applications you would use the build all target, which keeps the versioning artifact versioning at 7.6.3 and won't direct update the store applications due to the mismatch

In the end if you want to build both native applications and have users utilize the application store you would run both targets when a build is required, which would result in multiple versions of the application being uploaded to your MobileFirst console,  one to push out updates to the application store apps and one to push out updates to the native applications as we see with android below. 

One thing to note even though the version is 7.6.2 for the app store artifacts, the direct update pushed out to the app stores will show the correct 7.6.3 release in the about menu.   

If you have any questions or comments regarding this document please feel free to comment below.