Scaling Mobile Development by Treating Apps as Services
Article Summary
Shopify scaled to multiple mobile apps without slowing down. Their secret? Stop treating apps like special snowflakes.
Shopify's Mobile Tooling team faced a common scaling problem: each mobile app used different tools and configurations, making it nearly impossible to enforce best practices or share knowledge across teams. They solved it by extending their internal service tracking system, ServicesDB, to treat mobile apps exactly like backend services.
Key Takeaways
- ServicesDB enforces a contract: ownership, CI/CD, monitoring, and versioning checks
- Automated checks create GitHub issues with fix instructions when standards aren't met
- One configuration file codifies best practices across all mobile projects
- Teams stay loosely coupled but highly aligned through shared tooling expectations
Critical Insight
By treating mobile apps as services with automated compliance checks, Shopify created a scalable system that enforces best practices without slowing down independent teams.
