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.

Hi everyone! I’m very excited for my first launch on Product Hunt: Building Mobile Apps at Scale. While I was working at Uber, on one of the largest mobile apps - we had more than 100 iOS and 100 Android engineers working on the same app during the rewrite of the Rider and Driver Apps - I could not shake the feeling that non-mobile engineers, managers and directors did not fully comprehend the numerous unique challenges that building a large mobile app has. I’ve sat in countless meetings where a senior leader would handwave and say “oh, and the mobile part should be fairly straightforward to do - it’s just another frontend, after all.” I found myself explaining to product managers, backend and web leads the same things over and over again: why mistakes are more expensive and harder to fix on mobile. Why automated testing is difficult, and how snapshot and UI testing have their own quirks. Why “wrapping it in an iframe” is a solution that comes with its own set of downsides. I started to write down the common topics I’ve explained again and again, expecting these to be enough for a short document or a blog post. However, the list got longer, and when I shared an early draft on Twitter, I got even more suggestions to include from engineers working on similarly large apps. Finally, with 236 pages, 39 challenges and countless revisions, the book is ready. This book is free to read as a PDF, and is available in print and on Kindle as well. The free book is thanks to mobile tooling vendors I would have mentioned in the book anyway, but who generously agreed to sponsor the launch. Thanks very much Bitrise (CI/CD), Bugsnag (crash reporting), SonarSource (code quality & security), RevenueCat (in-app purchases), Touchlab (Kotlin Multiplatform experts), perf.dev (mobile performance), Craft Docs & Linear! I’d love to hear your feedback - and I’ll be here, on Product Hunt, for the rest of the day and answer any questions and comments you might have. Hope you enjoy the book!

I've recommended this book to anyone who will read it in my company. If you're in a team that's scaling or will scale soon, there's a lot of stuff to think about here. It's a great resource and I can't think of anything quite like it in the mobile space. Huge thanks, @gorosz!

@adam_bennett Thanks, Adam! The closest thing I found is the Mobile Native Foundation discussion boards, which launched almost the same time as the book (though completely independently).

@gorosz Ah yeah that's been helpful too :) good to see new knowledge sharing initiatives in this field.

At www.bitrise.io we work with a lot of sophisticated mobile engineering organisations, and when asked where they developed their understanding of mobile development at scale, the answers are similar: * Experimentation * Hiring in expertise * A small group of peers in other organisations What excited us about Building Mobile Apps at Scale is the fact that it would be a guide to the journey to scale, built on some of the most experienced folks in the industry. When we found out that @gorosz was working on this, we couldn't wait to contribute. The end-result delivers on that initial promise, and then some. It's seen heavy rotation throughout the company, and we've heard great responses from the customers we've sent it to so far. Heavily recommended for: * non-mobile engineers interested in understanding the challenges poised by the platform * managers and directors that want to accelerate their journey to scale

@rik_haandrikman Thanks for being the first sponsor for the book! This was the point I decided I can spend a lot more dedicated time working on the book, while also making the contents available for anyone both now as a PDF, and later as blog posts. The interesting things is how at Uber, we almost always built everything in-house, for ourselves (including CI/CD, experimentation & feature flags, analytics, crash reporting etc). We had reasons - at the time there were no tools fit for our use case - but I would now advise companies to be *very* cautions with this approach. It can be become expensive to maintain e.g. your homegrown feature flags system or builds, when it's not your bread-and butter. The other part I've learned is how many companies - even large ones - work in silos, solving similar problems again and again. I hope both this book, and the Mobile Native Foundation breaks down some of these walls.

Building Mobile Apps at Scale

The missing guide for building large apps

The missing guide for building large apps

Building Mobile Apps at Scale

The missing guide for building large apps

The missing guide for building large apps

Building Mobile Apps at Scale

Building Mobile Apps at Scale Launches

Do you use Building Mobile Apps at Scale?

Building Mobile Apps at Scale Launches

Do you use Building Mobile Apps at Scale?

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