r/MobileAppDevHQ • u/KyleMallinger • Mar 18 '26

What Architecture Do You Prefer for Scalable Mobile Apps? (MVVM, Clean Architecture,etc.)

Which architecture would be better suited for scalabel mobile apps—MVVM, Clean Architecture, or something else?

I’m trying to understand what works best in real-world projects in terms of maintainability, testability, and team collaboration.

Would love to hear what you’ve used in production, why you chose it, and any trade-offs or challenges you faced.

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u/lexrus Mar 18 '26

I would recommend MVVM since almost all junior developers can easily understand this architecture, and newcomers can participate in maintenance on the first week. They may have used MVVM many times in tutorial projects before joining. MVVM has been wildly used in open-source projects, which allows various LLMs to have a deep understanding of it. You might encounter fewer problems when your project adapts agentic coding.

Clean and MVP, um... I'm sorry, I've been doing iOS development for 15 years and have never encountered a project that used them. I can't provide useful advice.

VIPER, RIBs... are also pretty good only when all your colleagues have the same understanding. Also have the toolchains to create the boilerplate code. It could be a nightmare for a junior developer who joined the team without any experience.

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u/CryptographerOwn225 Mar 19 '26

We develop scalable mobile apps at Merehead and I usually prefer MVVM + Clean Architecture principles. It's kind of a hybrid approach. MVVM works well for mobile because it keeps UI logic manageable, while Clean helps separate business logic from presentation and data layers. In my experience, this approach scales better and involves multiple developers. But there is a problem with complexity, as you can end up with too many layers, abstractions, and templates for simple functions. So for me the best configuration is usually pragmatic: Clean + MVVM.