App inside App inside App [part 1]

This article is to discuss latest trend of apps inside the app & how to achieve it.

Just like the movie “Inception”, these days I am seeing mobile apps which are holding multiple apps inside their single giant application, these giant apps are already having a user-base of 1M to 10M. When you enter in the main app & you start pushing buttons, at one point of time you reach some section where sometimes you forget, is this the application I opened at first? This phenomenon “Apps inside App” sometimes hard to achieve technically & hard to understand from the point of view of end-users.

Let’s talk about it.

Flipkart

Flipkart has almost 4–5 different apps inside the main Flipkart application. It’s a matter of debate “what to call those sections”. Those are modules, or the independent app itself?

1. Essentials
2. Grocery
3. Quick
4. Supercoin
5. Gaming Zone

And of-course the main app “Flipkart”.

We will go into technical details & architecture of these apps in part 2 of this article. We will see best practices to implement frontend & backend architecture. In this article let’s go through few more such apps so that you all can understand this new trend.

Paytm

We all know how Paytm is growing in all directions using cutting edge technology. If you open Paytm, it has a server-driven customisable UI at any given point in time. The only problem with it, it’s the user experience. I feel it is clumsy. You have n number of options on the Home page itself. Then comes “Apps inside App”. Other than all the digital payment system services, Paytm have multiple services inside one single app.Paytm Games

1. Paytm Mall
2. Paytm Mini App Store
3. Paytm Bank

However, the difference between Paytm & Flipkart Paytm is having few standalone apps too in the app market. Like Paytm Mall & Paytm Games.

Again this is a separate topic of discussion, how to keep your backend intact while doing all these things. When you have multiple apps which consume a single backend service, developers need to think about several aspects of it. Few I am mentioning here :

1. Single Code base (To reduce duplicate work)
2. Conditional statements (We all know how clumsy this if/else could be)
3. Source of truth (The database) (To go with Micro-service architecture or Monolithic)
4. Update cycles & downtime (Impact on your main app)
5. Size of final APK or IPA.

And the biggest question comes “which technology to use”. There are several apps in the market which are “all native” in nature. Few apps are going hybrid these days. Few apps are going with a modular approach. Few apps are going with Native + Web pages.

We will discuss the in-detail pros & cons of these approaches in the next section, which will be more technical.

It is for sure a good idea to keep all your eggs in one basket when your basket is accessible to many. However, always keep in mind when you have all eggs in one basket, you need to make sure that you are taking good care of that basket & giving all your blood & sweat to it.

See you all in next article. Here is the link