Assessing the feasibility of Micro frontend architecture in native mobile app development

Since their introduction, mobile application development has become complex and now rivals web app development. The primary factor contributing to this complexity is their monolithic architecture: a mobile application is still deployed as a single unit. In contrast, web applications have adopted modular architectures such as Microservice or Micro FrontEnd (MFE). This last approach divides development into teams, each responsible for an MFE corresponding to a specific software feature. Our study examines the adoption of the MFE architecture on native mobile platforms. This paper discusses: i) how MFE can be adapted to current native mobile platforms; ii) the limitations of adapting MFE architecture on mobile; and iii) the challenges MFE introduces to mobile application development. Despite challenges in composing mobile MFEs post-deployment, our research highlighted maintaining a static development-side composite is feasible, albeit with a loss of flexibility. This allows team separation and independent feature development, though technological agnosticism isn't achieved.