Open Sourcing Thumbprint Native Design System
Article Summary
Mallika Potter and Kevin Beaulieu from Thumbtack reveal how they open-sourced their entire native design system—and the surprising technical challenges they had to solve first.
Thumbtack built Thumbprint, a cross-platform design system for iOS and Android, to standardize their product experience as they shifted focus to mobile. After years of internal use, they decided to open-source it to help the broader mobile community, which has far fewer design system resources than web.
Key Takeaways
- Solved licensing issues by creating helper functions for swappable icons and fonts
- Migrated from Jenkins to GitHub Actions for public CI and releases
- Duplicated testing code to eliminate dependencies on private internal codebases
- Built accessibility and easy customization into every component from day one
- Now manages small friction of three-step process: update, release, upgrade
Thumbtack successfully open-sourced their iOS and Android design systems by untangling private dependencies, solving asset licensing constraints, and accepting manageable development overhead.
About This Article
Thumbprint's iOS and Android design systems used licensed icon and font assets that couldn't be publicly released. This made it impossible to open-source the project.
Thumbtack built static register functions that let users plug in their own icons and fonts through XML or code. They also published boilerplate open-source alternatives in the public repositories.
This modular approach let Thumbtack open-source both iOS and Android design systems without running into licensing issues. Thumbprint is now available on GitHub for anyone to use.