You might picture mobile engineers as blissfully unaware drones, making castles in the sandbox provided to us by our favoured tech giant, tongues lolling and eyes glazing over while we wait 30 minutes for Xcode to build.
Perhaps you’re picturing a colleague right now.
Mobile devs aren't exactly up to our eyeballs in container orchestration conundrums, battling the distributed computing basilisk, or untangling hours-long JOIN operations in billion-row DBs.
But hold onto your FitBits, naysayers. I’m about to shatter the illusion that mobile development is a walk in the (Apple) Park.
The OS is constantly trying to kill you
The iOS and Android operating systems are a microcosm of the fickle gods we serve - Apple and Google. Picture Jobs or Page standing behind your app with piano wire, just waiting for it to step out of line.
Perhaps you've used a smidgen too much memory or CPU.
Or, more likely, you’ve kicked off a background task to download a file, and your user got bored and TikTok started hogging all your system resources.
Too bad. Garotted.
Capricious overlords & prod incident purgatory
I’ve been building production mobile apps for 7 years, and my blood still runs cold every time an incident wriggles out of the woodwork. I can usually fix it within hours, but the fix won’t get released until Apple or Google deign my little app worthy of their attention.
In my darkest days, I was once on the hook in App Review for over 50 days while a SEV-2 smouldered in the background. Fortunately, we could finesse some hacks on the backend to work around it, but if we were less lucky our company could have been killed dead by Apple’s machinations.
The closest a backend or web engineer might get to this terror is if they are a customer of CircleCI, when you could have your prod fix ready to deploy in minutes, but are blocked for several hours while CircleCI fixes their own incident.
CircleCI, please sponsor my Substack
Diligent feature flagging isn’t just for A/B testing here - it’s a matter of survival. Fortunately, like any good benevolent dictators, Apple and Google have deemed us worthy of basic tools like phased releases to prevent outright revolt.