I've been building mobile apps for nearly a decade, progressing from personal projects to winning awards for the best app in the Play Store. In the early days, mobile app development felt groundbreaking, but now it has become more of a commodity. I vividly remember my first experiences with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), where writing HTTP calls inside the main thread often led to unresponsive apps due to slow network connections.
Multithreading and Asynchronous
As the Android ecosystem evolved, we had to evolve quickly from those early implementations to better practices—moving from AsyncTask, which was prone to memory leaks, I adopted OkHttp for more efficient HTTP management. This progression continued with the integration of Retrofit, which streamlined and modernized network operations, making API interactions more manageable and less error-prone.
Google’s Support Library
To enhance app compatibility and ensure a consistent user experience across various Android versions, I incorporated Android Support Library - AppCompat. This library provided backward-compatible versions of Android components, allowing me to leverage newer UI elements and functionalities without sacrificing support for older devices.
You may have heard the phrase ‘the best code is no code.’ While we don’t recommend not writing any code at all, the code you do write should be adding unique value to your app rather than replicating common boilerplate code.
Event Driven Architecture
The evolution didn't stop there. For handling communication between components, I initially relied on EventBus, which simplified message passing between activities and fragments. However, as apps grew more complex, I embraced RxJava for reactive programming, which allowed more elegant management of asynchronous tasks, threading, and event-driven architectures. This was a significant leap forward, enabling more responsive and scalable applications.
Clean Code Architecture
The rise of Clean Code Architecture, popularized by Uncle Bob, significantly influenced Android development. This approach marked a shift from making HTTP calls directly within an Activity to adopting a layered architecture that separates concerns between the Model, View, and Presentation layers. This separation not only enhances the testability of applications but also encourages a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach.
Then, Google introduced Android Architecture Components like LiveData and ViewModel--MVVM to help manage UI-related data in a lifecycle-conscious way. These components made it easier to separate concerns, manage UI state, and handle lifecycle events, but they still required additional tools (like RxJava) for complex asynchronous operations.
Material Design
On the UI front, I witnessed a transformation from basic layouts to more sophisticated designs. Early on, we worked with LinearLayout, RelativeLayout, and custom views to build user interfaces, but as Android matured, so did the UI frameworks. Material Design - Android lollipop introduced a unified design language that brought consistency across Android apps. Tools like ConstraintLayout offered more flexibility and power in UI design, enabling complex layouts with fewer nested views.
Now, with the advent of Jetpack Compose, we're seeing another revolution in Android UI development. Compose simplifies UI creation by using a declarative approach, which allows developers to build UIs more efficiently and with greater flexibility. Coupled with Kotlin Coroutines for managing asynchronous operations, the modern Android development stack is more powerful and developer-friendly than ever.
Rise of React Native and Hybird Development
I first used a hybrid app built with Cordova - PhoneGap, but I faced performance issues because the app ran inside a WebView. Also, the concept of the Virtual DOM (React) hadn't been introduced yet. Hybrid apps were not yet widely adopted, though they held promise despite the limitations in technology and hardware.
In 2015, Facebook introduced React Native, revolutionizing cross-platform development by offering a smoother app experience. This was achieved by bridging the gap between web-based hybrid apps and fully native apps, providing the efficiency of code reuse while maintaining near-native performance. This "write once, use everywhere" approach quickly gained popularity due to its efficiency and flexibility. React Native's strong community support and compatibility with third-party libraries further solidified its position as a leading framework for hybrid app development.
Google introduced Flutter, another powerful framework that took hybrid development a step further. Flutter uses a single codebase to create high-quality, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop.
Conclusion
In today's world, mobile apps have become a commodity—nearly anyone can build an app. This shift has made it more important than ever to focus on creating high-quality, differentiated experiences. As the frameworks and tooling for app development become more mature, the barrier to entry continues to lower, making it easier for anyone to create an app.