Show HN: I wrote the book Building Mobile Apps at Scale

Thank you for the book, I really love your YouTube channel, very informative!

congrats on publishing! it was SUCH a good read and incredible quality. Absolutely recommend that everyone get it before the free period runs out, and then buy the full edition anyway because it is that good.

>I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend, right?".

Oh my. As an Engineering leader, I've had this conversation many, many times.

"I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend, right?"."

You sold me on the book with this sentence alone. =)

"I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend, right?"."

I've heard that before too. Even before getting in to the various engineering issues between different platforms, if you're talking about 'native apps' - things to go in to an app store - specifically apple... that "it's just another front end" line is beyond laughable.

The effort involved in simply packaging up a handful of mobile apps for distribution in app stores - between multiple icons, splash screens, basic device testing... is often a level beyond what people who've not worked in mobile have ever had to deal with it - especially internal 'line of business' app folks.

I say this as someone who's only done a small number of mobile apps (some angular/ionic years ago), and looking recently, it's only worse.

>> I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend, right?".

My answer for that usually: "Have you ever noticed any project typically has 90% bugs on frontend?"

That sounds weird. I won't refute, because I used a Google Accounts email (albeit with my own domain). But what makes you say that?

Ran into same issue. What worked was the first email that gives you a link to gumroad. After using the coupon and providing an email to gumroad, it showed me the confirmation page, but didn't send me an email for the PDF. The fix was to go to that gumroad confirmation page, and where it says "enter a password" (basically it'll create a gumroad account) you'll then be able to login and check your gumroad account, book should be there.

Ouch. Feel free to email me on this [1] email address and I’ll help sort it out.

Gumroad has fraud protection for free “purchases” as well and I’m also filtering out domains that are known to have high bounce rates or not valid domains.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/connect/

Same issue for me. Just emailed you. Thx

This one was both surprising to me, but having worked on an app with >100 engineers, also less so.

The challenge is how with 100 engineers you typically still want to ship 50-100x as much as with 1 engineer. And all those small features that the 1-3 mobile eng-sized teams work start to have unwanted/unexpected impact on each other, bringing down collective app stability.

Also, the >100 Engineer apps are typically used globally, with often millions of users. Many of the crashes will come on Android, on exotic hardware / old OSes, in my experience.

It is fascinating, regardless.

Doing a paperback version for Growing as a Mobile Engineer would have been additional work I wasn't ready to take on.

And the paperback distribution is done through print-on-demand, so I can't bundle a digital book with it.

I say go for whatever is more useful to you: two ebooks, or a print book.

For transparency, the $20 bundle bought online nets me $19 (Gumroad fees are 3.5% + 30¢), while the $22.50 print book will be around $9.50 (Amazon shares 60% of the revenue, plus I pay for the printing of about $4/book). The $22.50 Kindle book on Amazon nets $7.70 (Amazon pays a 35% royalty on Kindle books above $10).

Unfortunately, I don't.

When I was at Uber, a team built an in-house system where people/teams could record a series of steps, then someone else could mark them as complete or failed with comments. It worked surprisingly well for our use case (execute all sanity tests every week - throw in email reminders, integrating with the build train (to not release to the app store when a test fails), and to the alpha/beta fixing process.

I am unsure what is available as off-the-shelf in terms of tooling though.

Hawk eyes - thank you! Fixed.

I’ll share my perspective from working in big tech. Mobile apps aren’t the sexy tech they once were (like in 2012). We do have mobile apps critical to the customer experience. Even the same app may have some components or features built natively, using some framework (React Native), or html rendering. And these apps are supported by dozens or more teams across organizations.

Delivering this at scale is hard. And big tech likes to launch things quickly, and so you might see something that’s an obvious thing to fix… but it turns out that changing that one thing will break several other things. There’s no single holistic architecture even within one distribution of the app.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re a thing of the past. Mobile apps aren’t as novel anywhere - your customers expect a mobile app. That actually raises the stakes because making the wrong architectural decisions is going to be very costly in the future as your business has to scale or might even straight up prevent your business from becoming successful in the first place.

Anyway - kudos to the author on publishing.

As long you can't use push notification with Safari (iOS) mobile apps won't be of the past

> I'm thinking mobile apps are a thing of the past.

They _should_ be mostly. Apart from push notifications and 3D rendered games and cutting edge apps using phone tech that isn't available in html - very few apps in use today couldn't be published as a PWA.

"App Store discoverability" its totally a thing people want though. You can't publish/find PWAs in Apple's App Store.

>But writing a book is a hell of a job. I did it once, it was hard, as hell and the everybody pirated it.

You probably know this, but don't get _too_ disheartened by that. Very few of the sort of people who happily pirate books would have paid for them anyway. Same as how the movie/music industries claims of billions of dollars lost to piracy are just self serving hyperbole bullshit.

> I'm thinking mobile apps are a thing of the past.

Do you think this is the future or actually happening right now? Because as an iOS developer I've seen zero reduction in work since close to a decade. What I have not seen, is people favoring web apps.

I mean I could be totally wrong but, it is my perspective at least.

Thanks! Yes, I used both, and one of the founders of Linear App was a staff mobile engineer at Uber, where we worked together.

Bugsnag is mobile crash reporting and Linear App project management (not specific to mobile, more like an alternative to JIRA). I see zero overlap between them.

AFAIk they are not competitors. Linear is akin to Jira/Trello. Bugsnag is akin to Crashlytics.

It does discuss feature flags and touched on navigation approaches and the challenges with these. It doesn't touch on coordinators per say: it's one of the many patterns you can use.

Thanks - fixed! I extensively proofread the book and hired proofreading help, but not the for the website. It shows!