Mobile Application Architecture Patterns

After exploring principles and layered design, one thing becomes clear: structure alone isn’t enough. Layers define boundaries, but within those boundaries, we still face tough questions. These look like:

Where should the logic go? Who manages the state? How do we avoid everything ending up in the UI layer again?

Now, mobile apps aren’t just small websites running on a phone. They come with unique challenges. Every mobile platform (like iOS or Android) has life cycle rules. The system might halt your app in the background, rotate the screen, change network conditions, or reclaim memory without warning, triggering the UI to adapt and react gracefully to changes. Moreover, to keep up the performance, a mobile app should load fast, run smoothly, and not drain battery. These constraints push mobile developers to carefully separate concerns.

Overtime, developers began noticing repeatable shapes in their solutions. These shapes, which are structured approaches to handling UI, business rules, and data flow, evolved into the patterns we use to navigate complexity with clarity.

This is where architecture patterns step in, not as rules, but as answers shaped by years of hard lessons and evolving platforms.

This lesson is about architectural patterns. They guide the flow inside our app and influence what grows easily and what doesn’t. Therefore, choosing one is a matter of what our app truly needs, and not just what’s popular.

Let’s explore architecture patterns.

Mobile architecture patterns

Mobile architectural patterns are structured design approaches that help manage the complexity of building scalable and maintainable mobile apps. They define how the user interface, business logic, and data layers should interact to handle mobile-specific challenges like app life cycle, limited resources, and fluctuating connectivity.

Commonly used patterns in mobile development include:

• MVC (Model-View-Controller)It was introduced in 1979 by Trygve Reenskaug.It was introduced in 2005 by John Gossman, a Microsoft WPF and Silverlight architect.

• MVP (Model-View-Presenter)It originated in the early 1990s at Taligent, a joint venture of Apple, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard.

• MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel)It was introduced in 2005 by John Gossman, a Microsoft WPF and Silverlight architect.

• MVI (Model-View-Intent)Popularized on Android by Hannes Dorfmann around 2016, drawing inspiration from Redux and unidirectional data flow.

• VIPER (View, Interactor, Presenter, Entity, Router)Created by Mutual Mobile around 2013, based on clean architecture principles for scalable iOS apps.

Each offers a unique way to structure how your app responds to user actions, manages data, and updates the UI. We’ll walk through each pattern with an example (a simple food delivery app evolving with features), showing when, why, and how to use them effectively.

Let’s start with the pattern that started it all: MVC.

MVC (Model-View-Controller)

You’ve probably heard of MVC even if you’re new to software architecture. It’s the grandparent of UI patterns and has gradually made its way into web, desktop, and mobile development.

MVC is all about separating concerns, and breaking our application into three distinct components that handle different responsibilities: Model, View, and Controller.

To understand this, let’s start with the simplest version of a food delivery app. It launches, fetches a list of nearby restaurants, and displays them on the screen. There is no login, search, or order placement, just a list. It’s clean and focused. This is where MVC fits well.

• Model: This is all about our app’s data and business logic. It knows how to fetch data from the server, for example, a list of restaurants from an API.

• View: ...