First, consider that no unique solution solves every issue for any business. Each application has its challenge, particular features, and business rules which can influence how to deal with the situation.

Watts S. Humphrey said that “Every business is a software business.”

This article discusses the importance of software architecture, the most common errors, and how to avoid mistakes and choose the right approach for your mobile application.

What is software architecture, and what’s it for?

Software architecture refers to a set of processes, techniques, and rules that defines patterns to develop an application. It helps the developer to create software that attends to the business requirements with attributes such as quality, performance, maintainability, scalability, usability, etc.

Why use software architecture? Is it a must?

Imagine you’ll build a house. What decisions do we need to consider before starting the process? Perhaps the house design, the materials used, or the people involved. Notice that these decisions are a must-step and define the foundation and quality of the house.

Likewise, a mobile architecture is based on decisions about essential parameters that determine the quality of the software, scalability, and more. In other words, it’s the organization of a system that includes all elements, how they interact with each other, the environment in which they operate, and the guides used to design the application.

Standard approaches

Let’s check the advantages and disadvantages of the most popular mobile architectures used as a standard approach, i.e., without the need to think about a custom implementation:

MVC (Model — View — Controller)

Advantages:

• Development becomes fast.
• It can benefit multiple developers to work together.
• Easier to debug and update the application.

Disadvantages:

• Increased complexity and can be challenging to scale.
• Must have strict rules on methods.
• Potential for an excessive number of updates.

👉 Apple inc. shared that MVC is central to a good design for a Cocoa application. The benefits of adopting this pattern are numerous.

MVP (Model — View — Presenter)

Advantages:

• Very understandable.
• Easier code maintenance.
• Easier to test components in isolation.

Disadvantages:

• Tight coupling between the View and the Presenter.
• It can be challenging to test since the presenter depends on N services, which implies more mocking in the tests.
• It can be challenging to scale.

MVVM (Model — View — ViewModel)

Advantages:

• Facilitates easier parallel development.
• Reduces the quantity of business logic required for each step.
• Easier to handle the unit test and can be tested without concerns about UI.

Disadvantages:

• It can be overkill for simpler UI or business logic.
• The data bindings can take more work to debug.
• In more complex apps, it does not provide the necessary abstraction to avoid large files.

👉 John Gossman, Software Engineer and Executive at Microsoft, reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of the MVVM pattern and its application in specific situations, noting that it can be “overkill” when creating simple user interfaces.