I've been noticing that while there's a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there's a lot less empathy for why mobile

10 Engineering Challenges Due to the Nature of Mobile Applications

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2024-09-08 15:30:05

I've been noticing that while there's a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there's a lot less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale. Building a backend system that serves millions of parallel customers means building highly available and scalable systems and operating these reliably. But what about the mobile clients for the same systems?

I've been building native mobile apps since 2010: starting on Windows Phone, later on iOS, and Android. Starting from one person apps, I worked with small teams at Skyscanner, to hundreds of engineers working on the same codebase at Uber. Here, I've been part of the Rider app rewrite, Driver app rewrite, both projects involving hundreds of mobile engineers. The apps my team worked on had 100M monthly users in 60+ countries, with several features built for a single country or region.

Most engineers - who have not built mobile apps - assume the mobile app is a simple facade that requires less engineering effort to build and operate. Having built both types of systems: this is not the case. There is plenty of depth in building large, native, mobile applications - but often little curiosity from people not in this space. Product managers, business stakeholders, and even non-native mobile engineers rarely understand why it "takes so long" to ship something on mobile.