Why the Right Framework Creates Impactful Apps

Why are some companies reluctant to upgrade their frameworks?

Moving on from your old framework can take significant rewriting of the mobile app’s code, which can be time consuming at first. Moreover, migrating from familiar XML views to Jetpack Compose can be intimidating for developers without experience using a new Android toolkit. It can feel safer to stick with what you know.

However, making the migration will – in the long run – make the entire app development process simpler, as features will take less time to implement and won’t each require an individual rewrite.

Best practices to start with Jetpack Compose

Cross-team communication is key for ensuring that your app development starts off on the right path, and remains so. This is especially important for mobile apps with multiple features. Having proper alignment at the beginning is crucial to a successful migration. This means everyone involved in creating this digital product, from your business analysts to UX designers to developers, must be on the same page.

Spending more time at the beginning to organize architecture and components will save you a lot of time and headaches later on. 

A design style guide is a vital tool for alignment. Define typefaces, and organize colors, fonts, and other basic components you plan to use for your mobile app. Set standardized names for each component in your style guide. These key steps ensure clear communication between everyone working on your mobile app, including your internal software team and outsourced developers, for the entire lifespan of your app. Once you set up standardized definitions, your developers and designers won’t have to cross-check. 

This may sound like common sense, but you would be surprised how many projects don’t have things organized from the beginning, with the expectation that things can always be aligned later on. However, the faster your app grows new features, the harder it will be to ensure consistency across development.

The next step to migrate to Jetpack Compose is to create generic reusable components based on your style guide. This step requires some commitment of resources, but saves a huge amount of time later on. Always be sure to follow official Google guidelines on building scalable components, and ensure your team is following the same naming conventions. Having a single source of typefaces, colors, fonts and components is crucial, as your entire team must re-use it during all future work.

Choose continuous maintenance over rushing migration

As the user base for your digital product grows, you may want to add new features to your mobile application. However, due to the exponential evolution of technology, your framework might not always be up-to-date with the demands of adding these features.

If you only upgrade your framework when you urgently need a new function or app feature, you will inevitably cause unnecessary delays, with seemingly small changes eating up weeks of valuable time. To make matters worse, rushing to migrate will increase your team’s stress levels. Plus, it is always more expensive to perform a framework rehaul than it is to consistently maintain your application’s framework.

Just like how successful business analysts keep an eye on market trends, you should iteratively update and improve your framework with new versions. You can devote as little as one hour to checking if your application framework is still compiling. 

This is the best way for your mobile app to release a feature while its functionality is still relevant to your users, ensuring that you make the maximum impact on the market. 

If your mobile app needs an update and you don’t know where to begin, the Seven Peaks team is ready to help.

Find out how Seven Peaks Software can support your business goals and drive your successes from ideas to digital products here.

Fedor Erofeev, Senior Android Developer at Seven Peaks

Fedor has more than 7 years of experience working with Android, and has been featured in El Androide Libre by El Espanol. He has worked on various projects with over 1 million downloads, has created multiple personal applications that generated 700k+ downloads on Google Play, among which is one of the top-grossing Android widget at 500k downloads.

Fedor is passionate about software design patterns and architecture, problem solving, and keeping abreast of new technologies.