THE The importance of architectural design patterns in mobile app development

Abstract

Choosing an appropriate architecture is a crucial and necessary step in mobile application development. In this paper, we present a systematic comparison of the most popular architectural patterns and discuss their importance for mobile app development. In our research, we focused on eight architectural patterns from the Jetpack library. We wanted to investigate their impact on the course and outcomes of mobile app development. This is why we have developed an Android application using each of the eight patterns. In order to assess their role, we developed eight more mobile applications. They differ from the previous ones only in that we did not use the Jetpack architectural patterns, but instead developed the applications ad hoc. We compared the applications using several criteria, including time, effort and code quality metrics. Based on this, we argued the rationale for using the patterns in the given contexts. In this paper, we demonstrate that the mobile app development using Jetpack architectural patterns is not only less demanding, but also requires fewer lines of code despite the higher component number. We show how, despite the use of architectural patterns, product development time and internal quality of applications was comparable to those developed with alternative approaches.