Scaling mobile app development at REA
As REA's technology capability has grown to over 500 people across many teams, its mobile development capability has been largely centralised in a few teams. In a world where almost every new product needs a presence in our mobile apps, we've been making changes to allow us to build for mobile at scale.
In this talk, Prasanna and Stewart will address some of the challenges faced as we've scaled, that are accentuated when building mobile apps as opposed to web. We'll share REA's experience meeting these challenges by moving away from a single mobile team to a federated model where mobile development happens across many teams. That model required a new approach to the architecture of both our mobile apps and their companion APIs.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
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Challenges of a central mobile team at REA
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Delivering software across multiple teams in a federated model
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Using a companion API or Backend For Frontend to drive the mobile experience
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Building apps with a platform mindset
Learning Outcome
You'll come away with an understanding of the unique challenges developing mobile apps at scale from our experience at REA, and how we are overcoming those challenges through a combination of a federated delivery model and an appropriate mobile app and architecture strategy.
Target Audience
Technical and delivery leaders
Prerequisites for Attendees
This talk will focus on the organisational and high level architectural challenges, but experience with mobile apps themselves is not a pre-requisite.
Links
Prasanna presented a more technical take on this for an iOS developer audience at the local Cocoaheads iOS meetup. Unedited video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ircAjJBCx2I) and slides (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ko0ffylp311fpdx/Scaling%20Mobile%20with%20architecture.key?dl=0) are online.
