Here are a few things you probably did not know about Reddit's iOS and Android apps: they are ~2.5M lines of code each, with 500+ screens, and a total of 200 native mobile engineers work on the both of them (including a dedicated iOS and Android mobile platform team)... But a few years ago, things looked very different - and Reddit quietly rebuilt their native apps from 2021. Today's conversation goes through what happened and how, with three engineers from Reddit’s mobile platform team who led this work: Lauren Darcey (Head of Mobile Platform), Brandon Kobilansky (iOS Platform Lead), and Eric Kuck (Principal Android Engineer) Watch or listen: • YouTube: • Spotify: • Apple: --- Brought to you by: • Graphite (we've moved to @graphite) — The AI developer productivity platform • Sentry — Error and performance monitoring for developers. Get 150k errors (three months of Team Plan) for free at --- Three of my takeaways from this episode: 𝟭. 𝗣𝗼𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 – 𝘀𝗼 𝗽𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻! One of the reasons Reddit started investing heavily in modernizing its mobile stack was that the “old stack” was slowing down developers. Reddit’s platform team got proof of this simply by asking native engineers about the biggest development-related challenges they face. 𝟮. 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸. Advice from Brandon for anyone looking to work on a platform team: "You should try to work at a tech company for a year or two and actually see what happens after you ship a system — and then the assumptions change! You then have to figure out how to keep this thing going. You get a bunch of software design intuition because you have to like re-evaluate your assumptions for an incredibly long time. If you can do that, you're probably ready for platform stuff." 𝟯. 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗔𝗜 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗻𝗼𝘁 “𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲” 𝘆𝗲𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗲. LLMs integrated into IDEs seem to be increasingly helpful with backend, fullstack, web and even cross-platform (React Native / Expo) projects. However, Reddit’s mobile team shared that they get a moderate boost from the Apple and Android Studio LLM additions. Native mobile development is distinctively different from web, fullstack and backend coding – and it seems that these IDEs with AI functionality have not done much to optimize for the expereince of native mobile engineers. Over time, this will likely change – but it’s a reminder that there are differences between fullstack, backend and native mobile development.(I wrote a book reflecting on more of the challenges unique to native mobile titled Building Mobile Apps at Scale)show more

Gergely Orosz

339,287 subscribers

Teilen Herunterladen