How to Choose the Best Mobile App Architecture for Your Business?

Before we head on with the process of how to choose the best app architecture, let us create the first part of the bridge first by answering — What is mobile app architecture?

Mobile app architecture, by definition means a set of patterns and techniques which are used to build an entire mobile app structure. The way a mobile app architecture is designed consists of three layers: Business Layer, Data Layer, and Presentation Layer.

While this is the theoretical explanation that is considered during the process of designing a mobile app development architecture, the technicality and complexities goes way deeper.

Whether you are looking for the final answer of how to design iOS app architecture or Android, you will come across many different types of application architecture. The types are not just categorized according to the platform, but also on the basis of the app category and functionality.

But is it only the different type that makes it important to choose application architecture before anything else?

Why is it important to choose an architecture pattern for app development?

Why is app architecture important is a question that crosses every newbie developer’s minds. Here’s the answer.

Selecting the best architecture must ideally be a primary and obligatory element of the app development’s designing and planning phase. However, at times, because of their lack of knowledge, negligence, etc, the process of choosing the right mobile app backend architecture (and frontend) is often ignored. This absence of architecture in mobile apps leads to major issues within the mobile app for not just the developers but also the end users:

• It becomes more errorsome
• It gets very difficult to build the product and maintain it
• Code is not very readable
• It becomes troublesome to have multiple developers work on the same project.
• A source code that does not have a design pattern or architecture is extremely hard to test, which leads to missing unit tests of the key functionalities.

Now that we have looked into the issues that emerge because of the wrong app architecture choice, let us look at how top-notch app development companies finalize an architecture.

How to choose the right architecture for mobile app development?

Having worked on more than 900 apps, we know what makes a good mobile app architecture, we know the best mobile app architecture practices and how a choice decision should be made. While on a technical level, it all comes down to how scalable the app architecture is or how reliable, maintainable it is, along with the provision it carries for code reusability, there are other things at play as well.

Here are the things we look at when finalizing the design architecture of mobile product -

A. Audience analysis

The step is extremely important when devising your mobile app architecture roadmap. After you have identified your audience and have analyzed their persona, you will get to know which platform you have to focus on, the type of experience you have to offer, etc.

B. Key feature requirements

It is important to note the prime functionalities that your users will be working on inside the application. It will give you an idea of whether you have to go for a Native approach, if there is a lot of device dependency or cross-platform, or even PWA.

C. App platform choice

Your idea of features of a good architecture will vary on the basis of the app platform choice. The architecture design of an Android app will be very different from an Android one and both of them will be very different from a web app architecture.

D. Development time

There can be some architecture which contains elements that take up more time to get developed or integrated, while there can be some which doesn’t take as much time. So, note your expected development time as well when choosing the right mobile app architecture.

E. Developers’ skill set

Ultimately, the choice of the right mobile app architecture will come down to the skill set your developers carry. There might be chances that the approach and components that you are planning to work with have not been worked on by your team of developers. When this happens, it is not just the development time that increases but also your overall mobile app development cost.

Here are the steps that we follow when finalizing a mobile app architecture. Is your process the same? Or do you do something differently? Share with us in the comment section below.