These days, it seems almost everyone owns a smartphone. In the US, 91% of adults have one, in Europe, this figure is 89%, while in India, Deloitte

The Pragmatic Engineer

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2025-01-16 17:00:08

These days, it seems almost everyone owns a smartphone. In the US, 91% of adults have one, in Europe, this figure is 89%, while in India, Deloitte predicts 75% of adults will have a smartphone by 2026. In total, there are an estimated 4.8 billion smartphone users in the world, which is an incredible number! This means that for tech startups and tech businesses that build consumer products, it’s a baseline expectation for them to be usable on smartphones, and for there to be a mobile app for the product.

So, how do you build mobile apps? There’s plenty of choice: you can build a native mobile app for iOS using Swift or Objective C as a programming language, make one for Android using Java or Kotlin, and of course, you can develop a web app for desktop and mobile web users. All this adds up to three separate codebases and plenty of business logic replication.

Or you can do what startups like social media newcomer Bluesky did: have one codebase that powers the web, native iOS, and native Android apps. For Bluesky, a single developer wrote the initial version of all three apps using React Native and Expo. We cover more on this in the article, Inside Bluesky’s engineering culture.