Design Considerations for Newsfeed Mobile System

Every tap, scroll, and pause in a mobile newsfeed app is a system-level decision echoing through layers of architecture.

Designing a mobile newsfeed app means the system must deliver fresh content fast, recover gracefully when connections fail, and manage scrolling and rendering smoothly on low-end devices. It should also preserve user actions even when the OS terminates the app mid-sync. It must do all this while balancing memory, battery, bandwidth, and latency without overwhelming developers with complexity.

The hard part is making the right architectural decisions before those features break in production. A mobile newsfeed system must answer questions like:

• What architecture pattern keeps UI logic clean but still adaptable?

• How do we manage the state so it survives background terminations, failed connections, or partial data syncs?

• How should we cache feed data to make the app feel instant on launch, while respecting storage limits?

• What API architectural styles, communication protocols, and data formats ensure speedy communication with the backend?

• How do we queue offline actions without duplicating requests or breaking intent?

The following illustrations differentiate between an undefined design and a structured design:

Without design decisions in place, that loop can become tangled, leading to sluggish updates, tangled views, and bugs that hide in remote corners of the codebase, resulting in users dropping off the app.

In this lesson, we’ll break down the design decisions that make this difference possible: separating responsibilities, structuring navigation, modeling feed state, and preparing the system for real-world interruptions.

Let’s start exploring the use of coordinators and dependency injection in mobile apps, and let’s choose the right mobile architecture patterns for the newsfeed.

Architecture pattern

Selecting an appropriate architecture pattern significantly influences development velocity, and runtime reliability in a mobile newsfeed system. Below is an evaluation of common patterns (discussed here) based on their applicability.

• MVC (Model-View-Controller): This pattern works well for simple views in a newsfeed. However, with requirements like infinite scrolling, offline support, and real-time updates, controllers often become overloaded with state and network logic. This leads to maintenance challenges and reduced testability.

• MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel): This offers a clear separation between UI and presentation logic. When our feed updates, such as when a friend’s post goes live, the ViewModel pushes the new content through an observable stream, and the UI refreshes without a single manual callback.

• VIPER (View-Interactor-Presenter-Entity-Router): While it ensures strong modular boundaries and is effective for complex, multi-feature apps, its layered setup is excessive for a focused newsfeed. This increases development overhead without proportional benefit.

• Clean Architecture: This approach supports strong separation of concerns and adaptability, enabling integration of back-end channels, GraphQL, edge caching, or on-device ML. However, its added layers can feel heavy when the core requirement is simply rendering a list of posts efficiently.