The architecture of your app is what stores the valuable data you're generating. It communicates with users of your app via notifications and API (Application Programmer's Interface) endpoints. It is the glue that holds all of the data together, and is what everyone talks about when they talk about "scaling" in the mobile app industry.

Your architecture is one of the more critical decisions you will make for several reasons, but mainly that the challenges you will face and the optimizations your framework will make for you are different in every case.

Ultimately, the architecture is either yours or your software engineers' decision to make, and everyone should absolutely be comfortable in the framework of choice.

The next sections discuss what an API is, when you do and do not need one, and what key features you should be looking for when making a long-term decision about the development methodology you intend to proceed with.

And while the framework choices are not permanent, changing it later will come with great cost, as much of the code created in one framework is not transferable to another.