Notion: going native on iOS and Android

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2024-12-12 00:30:08

In today’s exciting episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by two founding native mobile engineers from Notion: Austin Louden and Karn Saheb. Austin and Karn joined Notion in 2019 when Notion started to revamp its iOS and Android apps. Today, Notion's mobile apps are used by tens of millions of users.

⁠⁠⁠Details on the development process, including four types of environments, approaches to using modules, and practices around feature flags

1. Notion’s underlying data model is both flexible, but also tricky to work with. It was interesting to hear how much work Notion’s underlying data model created for the mobile engineering team. Notion chose a flexible data model that makes it easy to change parts of a document. However, this flexibility means a lot of added engineering complexity for all clients – including on mobile!

2. Notion’s native mobile team is surprisingly small. Notion employs about 600 staff, but the mobile team is only 11 people – including iOS and Android. This team size is very small, especially considering how Notion serves more than 10M users on both iOS and Android. We’re likely talking about one engineer for every ~2M or more users!

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