Since introducing them in the Radar in 2016, we've seen widespread adoption of micro frontends for web UIs. Recently, however, we've seen projects extend this architectural style to include micro frontends for mobile apps as well. When an app becomes sufficiently large and complex, it becomes necessary to distribute the development over multiple teams. This presents a number of challenges around team autonomy, repository structures and integration frameworks. In the past we've mentioned Atlas and BeeHive, but these frameworks failed to gain traction and are no longer in active development. More recent approaches include Tuist or the Swift Package Manager for integrating the work of multiple teams into a single app. But in our experience, teams often end up implementing their own framework for integration. While we definitely see a need for modularity in scaling up mobile development teams, the case for micro frontends is less certain. This is because while micro frontends imply a direct correspondence between teams and pages or components, this structure could end up blurring responsibilities for business domain contexts, thereby increasing team cognitive load. Our advice is to follow the basics of good, clean application design, embrace modularity when scaling up to multiple teams and adopt a micro frontend architecture only when the modules and the business domain are strongly aligned.
Since introducing them in the Radar in 2016, we've seen widespread adoption of micro frontends for web UIs. Recently, however, we've seen projects extend this architectural style to include micro frontends for mobile applications as well. When the application becomes sufficiently large and complex, it becomes necessary to distribute the development over multiple teams. This presents the challenge of maintaining team autonomy while integrating their work into a single app. Some teams write their own frameworks to enable this development style, and in the past we've mentioned Atlas and Beehive as possible ways to simplify the problem of integrating multiteam app development. More recently, we've seen teams using React Native to accomplish the same thing. Each React Native micro frontend is kept in its own repository where it can be built, tested and deployed separately. The team responsible for the overall application can then aggregate those micro frontends built by different teams into a single released app.
Since introducing it in the Radar in 2016, we've seen widespread adoption of micro frontends for web UIs. Recently, however, we've seen projects extend this architectural style to include micro frontends for mobile applications as well. When the application becomes sufficiently large and complex, it becomes necessary to distribute the development over multiple teams. This presents the challenge of maintaining team autonomy while integrating their work into a single app. Although we've seen teams writing their own frameworks to enable this development style, existing modularization frameworks such as Atlas and Beehive can also simplify the problem of integrating multiteam app development.
