Tender Loving Care for Mobile Apps
Mobile app developers- Do you love your app enough?
Mobile app development has many differences when compared with web or backend development. These apps need Tender Loving Care (TLC) that web applications don't need.
Mobile developers need to understand app rollout and adaption cycles. They need to build several soft and force upgrade mechanisms in the first version of their apps and they also need to think about fail-safe mechanisms in much greater depth than backend or web developers.
The cost of bugs is high for mobile apps and unless a forced upgrade is done, the buggy version can remain with customers for a long long time. That means you need to think beyond just building the next feature for your app. As an app TLC team member you need to truly care about your app.
Engineers, managers, product managers, and founders need to understand that mobile applications are very different from web applications and the team's structure, release process, etc. need to reflect this understanding.
Here are some of the things that mobile app developers need to worry about more than other developers:
- 🆕 Version control and updates
- 🛠️ Remote configuration
- 📱Saving and retrieving states across app switch/interrupts
- 📈App Health & Performance Metrics
- App size
- App start time
- Scroll performance
- Memory leaks and optimization
- Battery profiling
- 🧑🤝🧑 App Release automation & Developer Productivity
- Modules for separation of concerns
- App architecture & code organization
- Build time optimization
- Debug & release build flavors
- 🏗️ Common building blocks & libraries
- Networking, retries, network failures
- Local storage & database
- Image management
- Error management & crash reporting
- Concurrency & multi-threading
- ⚛️ Base level reusable components
- Atoms and molecules for atomic designs
- Base cards, Modals & Bottom sheets
The world is moving towards Smartphones and many new startups are building mobile-first or mobile-only products. Mobile app developers have a great responsibility on their shoulders.
The best app developers think beyond basic app development and give much-needed tender loving care to their apps!