What Are The Pitfalls Of Bad App Architecture?

Most of the time it's design and user experience that receive most of the attention when it comes to mobile apps. Cool designs, trend of flatness, content-is-king, and all similar things overshadow the architecture-related issues, which are nonetheless crucial for the end result.

App architecture is a high-level structure of the whole software system and code; it contains elements of the system and their correlations, and it's designed for easy scaling and improvement of the software code. When expectations of users rise and they become more and more demanding, it's not only visual design that requires highlighting. After all, it's the 'user-invisible' part that your software is based on. If costs and efforts get cut, what does it mean for software?

It Means Poor Security

If we put the human factor aside, it's architectural vulnerabilities that stand behind a huge number of security breaches that happened over the last couple of years. This means bad architectural decisions were taken by people who have probably the biggest influence on the inherent security of software. Afterwards, fixing a security issue will be more costly than building everything correctly from the beginning.

Any software that involves financial transactions and accounting, secure messaging and mailing, enterprise apps with confidential commercial data, any apps that have security as a cornerstone, mustn't have its costs cut on paying special attention to architecture and secure channels.

It Means Hard Maintenance

In the long term, maintenance costs can be reduced by investing more at the beginning. More money, more efforts from experienced software architects, and you rid of a bad side effect of saving money. If you are planning to grow big, eventual maintenance costs are much less likely to go out of your control.

It Means Bad Adaptation To Changes

If a certain degree of flexibility is not inherent to your software architecture, it may be technically impossible to add new functionality or new deployment environments in the future. The world of technology is constantly changing, and you might not know which changes you will introduce to your software in half a year, let alone over a longer period of time. Even a change that you'd consider quite basic, could break the logic elsewhere in your system. Good architecture is essential for eventual functional changes that are dictated by your current business purposes and requirements.

It Means Underdeveloped Scaling And Integration

When your business grows, your product has to grow simultaneously. Scalability cannot be neglected; otherwise you'll have to spend plenty of time altering the architecture – or rebuilding it anew so it can work in multi-server environment. Complex software systems depend on architecture like nothing else, since there is correlation between each other, as well as integration with third-party services and software that has to be foreseen.

It Means An Inevitable Waste Of Time And Money

A serious approach to the software architecture saves your money and time in the long run, and is more open to further enhancements, which will definitely take place if you succeed with the product. If you look to the future and foresee where your system should be expanded, it's a double win.

Good architecture is really 'invisible'; it just operates clockwork, being easy to maintain. Bad one has a short lifespan and may come to the point when your software is no longer operable, no longer integrates with your business well, and limits your options as for expansion.

A strong foundation makes a strong software product. If you have a project that requires experienced architects and developers, feel free to contact us at any time. We are always glad to provide you with a qualified consultation.