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Building Mobile Apps at Scale - 39 Engineering Challenges by Gergely Orosz

Book Summary

While there is a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there tends to be less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale.

This book collects challenges engineers face when building iOS and Android apps at scale, and common ways to tackle these. By scale, we mean having numbers of users in the millions and being built by large engineering teams.

For mobile engineers, this book is a blueprint for modern app engineering approaches. For non-mobile engineers and managers, it is a resource with which to build empathy and appreciation for the complexity of world-class mobile engineering.

The book covers iOS and Android mobile app challenges on these dimensions:

• Challenges due to the unique nature of mobile applications compared to the web, and to the backend.

• App complexity challenges. How do you deal with increasingly complicated navigation patterns? What about non-deterministic event combinations? How do you localize across several languages, and how do you scale your automated and manual tests?

• Challenges due to large engineering teams. The larger the mobile team, the more challenging it becomes to ensure a consistent architecture. If your company builds multiple apps, how do you balance not rewriting everything from scratch while moving at a fast pace, over waiting on “centralized” teams?

• Cross-platform approaches. The tooling to build mobile apps keeps changing. New languages, frameworks, and approaches that all promise to address the pain points of mobile engineering keep appearing. But which approach should you choose? Flutter, React Native, Cordova? Native apps? Reuse business logic written in Kotlin, C#, C++ or other languages?

• What engineering approaches do “world-class” mobile engineering teams choose in non-functional aspects like code quality, compliance, privacy, compliance, or with experimentation, performance, or app size?

Editorial Reviews

“An essential read for anyone working with mobile apps. Not just for mobile engineers - but also on the backend or web teams. The book is full of insights coming from someone who has done engineering at scale.” - Ruj Sabya, formerly Sr Engineering Manager @ Flipkart

“A must-read if you are a product leader - PM, Engineer, Designer - building products at scale. Gergely does an exquisite job breaking down the why, what, and how of mobile engineering challenges at scale. I have sat in meetings where the complexity of mobile was dismissed as 'it's just another frontend'. This is anything but the case.” - Ebi Atawodi, Director of Product @ Netflix

“This guide provides a rubric on how to approach scalable engineering, something the mobile ecosystem desperately needs. The battlefield of enterprise mobile development is littered with the remains of former high-growth tech companies. Mobile engineering done at scale is so unique and complex that no one really knows where to start.” - Jared Sheehan, Senior Director, Software Engineering @ Capital One

“Over the years, I've spent a lot of time explaining to non-mobile managers why building certain mobile features takes long. I wish this book was released five years ago - then I would just hand the book over to them and get back to the actual app development!” - Artem Chubaryan, Android Engineer @ Square

“Mobile apps require a totally different set of considerations compared to web applications. There is no shortage of books about building large-scale websites, but none about building large-scale mobile apps. Finally, we have a fantastic book that closes the gap.” - Emmanuel Goossaert , Senior Engineering Manager, Mobile App Platform @ Booking.com

“A concise, yet comprehensive overview of the Hard Parts™ of mobile engineering. The smartphone is the pre-eminent computing device of our time – it's worth spending time familiarizing yourself with its' native challenges.” - Shawn “swyx” Wang, Author of The Coding Career Handbook

“An exhaustive industry survey across the globe, compiling the mobile app challenges from startups to large tech companies. This book is pivotal in developing empathy towards native mobile app development, similar to how the Building Microservices book did this for backend development. A must read for anyone who wants to develop or strategize on how to build mobile apps at scale.” - Abhijith Krishnappa , Architect, Halodoc @ Halodoc