Handbook
Mobile platforms (blueprint)
Purpose: Platform-specific guidance for mobile development. Each platform guide covers setup, architecture conventions, tooling, and ecosystem-specific best practices.
Audience: Teams adopting Mobile Engineering; project-specific platform configuration stays in docs/development/mobile/.
Platform strategy is a product and staffing decision, not only a technical one: native stacks optimize fidelity and OS access; cross-platform stacks optimize shared velocity at the cost of integration depth and occasional framework lag. Use the guides below to align engineering leads, mobile chapter leads, and architects before locking choices in ADRs.
Platform guides
| Guide | Focus |
|---|---|
| Native iOS and Android | Swift/Kotlin, SwiftUI/Compose vs UIKit/Views, security, lifecycle state diagrams, distribution, HIG vs Material, profiling |
| Cross-platform mobile | RN / Flutter / KMP / hybrid / PWA taxonomy, decision flowchart, framework deep dives, comparison matrix, testing and migration |
Platform stacks (topic index)
| Platform | Focus | See |
|---|---|---|
| iOS / Swift | SwiftUI vs UIKit, Combine/async-await, Swift Package Manager, Xcode configuration, App Clips, Widgets | Native iOS & Android |
| Android / Kotlin | Jetpack Compose vs XML Views, Kotlin coroutines/Flow, Gradle, Android App Bundle, Instant Apps | Native iOS & Android |
| React Native | New Architecture (Fabric, TurboModules), Metro bundler, native module bridging, Expo, CodePush | Cross-platform |
| Flutter | Widget tree, Dart isolates, platform channels, Impeller renderer, Dart packages | Cross-platform |
| Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) | Shared module structure, expect/actual, Compose Multiplatform, Kotlin/Native interop | Cross-platform |
Native and cross-platform dimensions are expanded in the two guides above; this table remains a quick map of ecosystem topics.
Core knowledge: Mobile engineering body of knowledge — platform strategy decision framework, architecture patterns, lifecycle, and performance.
Bridge: Mobile Engineering ↔ SDLC ↔ PDLC bridge — how platform choices affect the lifecycle.
Keep project-specific mobile architecture decisions in docs/adr/ and platform documentation in docs/development/, not in this file.