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Mobile App Development
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The attractiveness and usability of a building depends on its architecture. Similarly, mobile apps do have a special architectural approach to make them useful and intuitive. Choosing an appropriate mobile app building blocks not only make the digital product engaging but also scalable to be future-ready. With the best architecture in place, your mobile apps will cater to all your business needs and lead the market.
The astronomical rise in mobile app development showcases the mobile app adoption move from novelty to usability. Increasingly, businesses of different sizes and types approach us for building an app that performs to the notch, has unique app features, helps them gain maximum users’ attention, and so on. With the latest 5G and other contemporary technologies such as AI/ML, IoT, and NLP, mobile devices have gained immense popularity among users and businesses. With 4.97 billion global mobile internet population, 60% of share in global internet traffic, and 143 billion mobile app downloads only by Google Play Store by 2026, the market of applications on mobile devices has an immensely promising future.
The mobile app architecture design works as a foundation for engineering quality, and zero-defect application. This is also essential for professional developers to perform their jobs faster with improved control over data and functionalities so that you can have must-have features in your mobile app without any hassle. Besides, changing the project scope in the middle of development or scaling the app becomes easier and simpler with mobile application architecture.
The businesses in the plan of building a mobile or web app should be aware of the mobile app architecture in detail. The complete mobile app development guide will let you know how to build an app, and other essential details related to architecture design are covered in this article.
Let’s dive in!
The mobile app architecture is a skeleton of the mobile application that defines all the components from a set of techniques to patterns needed to engineer an application while maintaining the industry standards. It acts as a framework that provides a roadmap and the best practices required to end up developing a well-structured application with no missing parts.
The components are selected in the architecture based on the app requirements, features set, tech stack, complexity, and design. A good mobile application architecture enables rapid app development and ensures hassle-free maintenance in the years to come.
Additionally, mobile app architecture terms cannot be interchangeably used with technology stack as it’s more concerned about the development process and business/user requirements. It answers everything from data collection and flows to platform and tech stack leveraged.
Mobile app architecture is crucial because it lays the foundation for an application that is scalable, efficient, and maintainable. If you have a well-designed architecture, you are assured to have optimal app performance and smooth user experience plus easy adaptability to changes likely to occur in the future.
Mobile app architecture defines how myriad UI components interact and ensure seamless integration and user-centric functionality. Moreover, it facilitates code reusability by simplifying the process of debugging and troubleshooting to improve overall app development cycle. Developers prioritize mobile app architecture to build robust apps that are capable to meet increasing user demands and industry standards.
Here are three essential factors showing why app architecture is important:
Mobile architecture for scalability allows an app to handle growing user numbers and data volumes without compromising app’s performance. This factor is essential for apps that experience rapid growth or timely fluctuations in usage. Developers design a scalable architecture to ensure that the app remains responsive and stable in any circumstances.
Today, data and transaction security are paramount in any mobile app development. Implementing robust security measures within the app architecture ensures protection against several threats like data breaches, cyberattacks, unauthorized access, and malware ingestions. Some of the essential components include encryption, authentication mechanisms, and secure communication protocols that all help build a secure app architecture to safeguard user privacy and confidentiality.
A well-designed app architecture gets us easy maintenance and updates of a customized application. Hence, it reduces the time and effort required for ongoing mobile app development tasks. Within the app architecture, modularization and clear code structure can contribute to easy maintainability as it enables developers to solve issues efficiently. It is the maintainable architecture through which developers implement new features and fix bugs while adapting to evolving requirements. Ultimately, an optimum mobile app architecture will ensure that the app remains competitive and up-to-date in the long run.
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The mobile app architecture is divided into multiple layers that are essential as it makes the operational layers work individually without interrupting others. Also, the building and execution of each component improves the mobile application development architecture understanding and enable developers to fix the issues instantly. The mobile app architecture diagram makes it easy to understand.
This layer is more about UI components and user process components that describe how the mobile app look and feel when presented to the end-users. During the presentation layer designing, the right type of data format, data validation, support for device form factors, and colors, fonts, & text location are taken care of. The UX design manages the user interaction with the app by understanding the complete journey throughout the app.
This layer is more about how data is presented before the end-users as it encapsulates the data types that the application uses, loading data from databases/networks, and data processing. Also, business logic defines the data processing that needs to perform to turn the data into a meaningful form for the end-users. The business layer involves workflows, components, and sub-layers namely- the domain layer and the service layer. The business logic layer deployed on the user and backend server remotely minimizes the overall load.
The layer meets the secured transaction needs of the businesses with a mix of service agents, utilities, and data access components. With growing data, it’s essential to select the right data format with a validation technique, which meets the scalability needs and invalid data input prevention. It meets the modification needs as the business requirements get updated. The data layer comprises two layers- the persistent layer and the network layer.
A persistent layer ensures easy data access from the mobile app backend in the same data format it’s stored. A networking layer offers the path for communication by establishing a logical connection, data forwarding, routing, and making network calls.
The rarely known component of mobile app architecture lies between the presentation and data access layer. This layer involves service interface specification and enforcement, and translator components for data format translation. It aims to decouple the presentation from the nitty-gritty of business logic specifics so that multiple presentation layers are created which are updated without impacting the presentation layer.
The components in the mobile app architecture must communicate with each other in some way, which requires building a communication infrastructure for every component. For instance, when data is stored on the application permanently if changed or updated after some time, then direct communication between the data enables the storage of the right value instantly.
The selection of the right mobile application architecture is all-important to drive business success with mobile app development. Implementing core logic, for example, in dynamic, scalable mobile applications is not possible. Architecture patterns with modular design can solve this problem. Here’s the list of different types of architectures that serves various business project needs.
The MVP model comprises three layers- model, view, and presenter. The model is a data-storage layer that’s created following business rules and enables communication of the components with the network layer and database. The view is a UI layer that improves data visualization and maintains a record of users’ actions to notify the Presenter effortlessly. The Presenter receives data from the model and makes decisions on what to show through UI logic. It helps with knowing the view’s status track and identifying the response to users’ input notifications.
The architecture pattern is preferred by the Android developers because it provides a codebase that’s easy-to-manage, and facilitates modularity and testability at scale.
The MVC model is divided into three parts namely- model, view, and controller that make the app maintenance easier. Model is a data layer that consists of objects, network code, parsers, and persistent. The view part is a UI layer that displays data and keeps tabs on the user actions to inform the presenter off the bat. The Controller works in-between model and view by sending messages back and forth following a set of defined rules.
The MVC architecture is favored for building dynamic websites where frequent updates are essential to reflect on the front end. For instance, the layout of all the Amazon product pages is the same, but they appear different due to distinct data updates from the database.
It refers to as model view ViewModel architecture that helps in the separation of design and code structure concerns. The model eliminates the need for putting the business logic in a controller or view, unlike the MVC model. It’s preferred for large-scale app development as it facilitates extensibility, code modularization, testability, and pluggability massively.
The Model layer is about abstracting the data sources, retrieving and saving data, and making the model and ViewModel collaborate. The View layer informs the users’ action to ViewModel. The ViewModel separates GUI development through GUI code.
Now since you are acquainted with different mobile architecture patterns such as MVC and MVVM etc., let us see some of the real-life mobile app architecture for major players in the market.
Real-life mobile app architecture examples show how different platforms and development approaches affect the overall app structure and performance. Each architecture type offers unique considerations like platform-specific features, code reusability, and development efficiency. Let us understand these examples to make informed decisions and optimize the app’s architecture for business goals.
MVVM separates different parts of the app, making it easier to manage and test using Android’s built-in tools. Here are some of the real-life Android mobile app architecture examples:
Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM): MVVM architecture separates the UI from business logic and data layers to promote modularity and testability. Android Architecture Components (AAC) such asLiveData and ViewModelcan facilitate such a pattern to enhance lifecycle management and data binding.
Model-View-Controller (MVC): MVC is known to divide the app into model, view, and controller components. Thus, for Android app, it promotes code organization and reusability while, at times, leading to tight coupling between layers and complexity in bigger apps.
Clean Architecture for Android: The clean architecture uses layers and inversion of code principles. The layers that compose this architecture are data, business, and presentation layers; in this architecture, each layer is independent and uses the interface to exchange data. This architecture offers myriad benefits like ease of testing and debugging, individual UI, and independent external libraries, database, and frameworks.
iOS apps generally divide component sections for easier management and functioning. There are newer approaches to make the entire development more streamlined.
Here are some of the real-life iOS mobile app architecture examples:
Model-View-Controller (MVC): MVC for iOS architecture is a traditional way to divide the app into model, view, and controller layers. This method has been widely adopted in iOS development but could lead to Massive View Controller issues and impediments in testing and maintainability.
Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM): MVVM here in iOS introduces view models to manage UI logic and improve the separation of concerns while enabling easier app testing. SwiftUI, Apple’s declarative UI framework can align well with MVVM principles to enhance developer productivity and code clarity.
There are cross-platform frameworks that enable developers to build apps that work on multiple devices running on different operating systems. It offers versatility and efficiency.
Here are some of the real-life cross-platform frameworks we use in app architecture:
React Native: React Native enables developers to build cross-platform apps using JavaScript and React. It is known to have a rich ecosystem of libraries and components to facilitate rapid development and code sharing. As it provides near-native performance at lower prices, React Native for startups has been quite popular.
Xamarin: Xamarin is another essential framework that allows developing native apps using C# and .NET. It provides access to platform-specific APIs and tooling toboost developer productivity and performance. However, it may require platform-specific adjustments.
Flutter: Flutter is one of the most popular UI toolkits by Google. Used to build natively compiled mobile apps, web apps, and desktop from a single codebase, Flutter offers hot reload for faster development cycles and communicative UI components for building visually appealing apps. With its reactive framework, Flutter ensures high performance and smooth animations on multiple platforms.
Apache Cordova: Apache Cordova is used to build hybrid apps with the help of web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This wraps web content in a native container and allows access to APIs.
Ionic Framework: Ionic Framework is used to blend web technologies with Angular or React to create hybrid apps. It is known for a library of UI components and tools to develop responsive and visually appealing UIs. Ionic offers a perfect balance between performance and development speed to suit various app types.
Xamarin.Forms: Xamarin.Forms allows building cross-platform apps using C# and .NET. Developers can sharing code across iOS, Android, and Windows platforms. It provides a native-like experience and access to APIs that are platform-specific.
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You know the steps to build an app, but at the same time, knowing a couple of principles for mobile app architecture designing is equally important to ensure the app performs as expected and reaps the advantages it deserves. These key principles are the minimum requirements that architecture should meet for the best results.
When the application executes the tasks successfully means every feature is working as defined and anticipated. The well-grounded architecture makes the app perform effectively under various load conditions.
The app must respond to environmental, market, technological, and customer preference changes to survive and thrive in the market. A single addition, updation, or deletion from the mobile app has a direct impact on the database, server, and other systems. The portability feature in mobile application architecture helps in diminishing the negative effect of accommodating the changes.
Testing each component of the mobile application before its launch is imperative. The mobile app architecture enables testing of every individual component under various conditions to make sure it works consistently.
Security is a cardinal aspect of mobile app development, wherein HTTPS, encryption techniques, PCI DSS, GDPR, SSL certificates, and other security compliance adherence is necessary. The mobile app security architecture sheds light on all the aspects that remain an entry point for hackers and showcases ways to seal the points. Also, it ensures the app complies with all the rules and regulations provided by the nation’s government.
Managing a mobile app efficiently is all-important to monitor the system performance, process execution, database security, and so on. A good architecture makes it easy to monitor and maintain everything that revolves around the mobile application.
The app development, app redesigning, and app upgrade get accelerated when existing components and protocols are leveraged. The architecture must be flexible enough to enable reusability in the app development cycle.
Making the mobile app stay on the top of the users’ minds forever requires frequent upgrades, bug fixes, performance improvements, technology advancement, and a lot more. It makes regular app maintenance vital. The mobile app architecture makes changes implementation time-savvy and inexpensive with high maintainability.
The app that performs glitch-free and at speed is most favored by users worldwide. It helps in reducing in abandonment rate and bouncing rate. The app architecture ensures future app performance optimization by paying attention to app design, efficient memory management, and leveraging performance monitoring tools to meet the minimum expectations of the users.
Identifying the ideal architecture for mobile app development is vital as it lays the foundation for future applications. You should perform the following steps to ensure the selected architecture is the best fit.
From usability studies to ethnographic interviews/surveys help in knowing the user behavior and provide an understanding of their experiences. The data gathered from user research when analyzed, the user personas, agile stories, wireframe, and prototype tests are created effortlessly. It helps in making data-driven UI and UX decisions for the mobile app.
The minimum viable product with basic features set is created to test the app idea in the market before its full-fledged version is launched. It helps to know the users’ responses and enhances the app according to the collected data and insights gained. The MVP release in a targeted market enables beta testing of the mobile application.
Evaluate which architecture pattern goes well with the target audience, platform choice, development time, budget needs, and meet features requirements before settling down with one mobile application development architecture design.
When you have narrowed down the choice to one architecture, it’s time to find out which architecture solves the development problems such as user engagement, high performance, attractive UI, improve convenience, and more.
The seasoned pros know the importance of mobile app development architecture design. Now, you know – why mobile app architecture is the backbone of your future app development, design, or upgrade. The mobile app development architecture guide enlisted everything from mobile app architecture definition, layers, and types to creating and selecting the best architecture along with pro tips.
What’s more? If you are still fuzzy about architecture building that makes your application a great success. We would love to help you with agile mobile app development and other services ahead.
He loves challenges and adept at finding tech-solutions that complement business ideas. Working in the capacity of Project Manager at Prismetric he strives to leave no chance for glitches in his implementation. He incorporates his extensive experience in his writings about new gadgets, tech stories, updates and innovations in technology, management tips, and inspiring app technology related information.
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