DEV Community

Discussion on: Can we ship mobile apps that are not monolithic?

Collapse
 
n8ebel profile image
Nate Ebel

This is an interesting idea.

It's challenging on mobile because apps are sand-boxed. Downloading/installing an app is also more of a heavyweight operation than serving a web app and you have to drive engagement to install multiple apps. Android Instant apps tries to solve this problem by allowing users to download/install portions of an application on the fly in a more "web-like" fashion. Hard to say how Instant Apps will pan out yet though since they are still pretty new.

All that said, it's certainly possible today(at least on Android where I spend my time).

My last company, esri has taken an approach similar to this for their suite of mobile apps. Each app is still large on its own, but the functionality is very focused. A user could get by with a single app, or might need multiple apps to complete their daily work.

If you define a constant data scheme between applications, and then expose actions/data in the ways the framework provides (Intents, content providers, etc on Android) you could build an experience where each separate app handled a very specific use case then passed the user on to the next app.