?? Mobile App Modernization in 2025 - The Problem

Your team is devoting two engineers, not skilled or up-to-date in react-native on adding new features to your now 4 year old app that was most recently released 2 years ago. Nothing's changed in the code, it'll be so easy, all I need is Cursor and a month of time...

What's the damage of 2 years of little development?

In two years, mobile operating systems and third-party libraries change enough to create major hurdles for new development.

During that time,

• Apple typically releases two major iOS versions (e.g., moving from iOS 15 to iOS 17) and drops support for older ones within 2 years[1].
• Android similarly rolls out one major update per year (e.g., Android 12 to Android 13, then 14) and phasing out older releases (though supporting security to more versions)[2].
• React native sees 3 updates/year[3],
• Expo sees ~4 updates/year[4],
• Google Play Store and Apple Play Store update agreements, UX guidelines, SDK targeting requirements[5], and questionnaires, tools like XCode major version releases each year[6], and
• Our node version will likely end long term support in a few months [7],
• Out of our perhaps 25 dependencies it's pretty likely at least 2 will be no longer maintained or behavior deprecated on new OS's or in favor of a major rewrite of the library[8], and
• Companies you depend on for media hosting or streaming may no longer exist[8].

By the time our business allows us to focus on mobile development, we'll wish we had petitioned harder for maintenance over the years.

Yeah, it's going to be ugly, but we're up for it.

Although I'd love to help you convince your product managers that mobile development is a whole different beast than web development and why maintenance is worth it, I'm not going to do that right now. Perhaps one day.

Often, we end up with this large modernization problem, and in 2025, perhaps, I can save you some time banging your head against a wall with an unruly mobile app.

I've been leading the development and technical direction for a modernization that's similar to this situation for over a year and in the next articles I will share how I practically and tactically achieved a modernization, releases, and new features for our client and the knowledge I gained of the current mobile development landscape which I believe you'll find helpful, clear, and concise.

I'm aiming to write these articles, but please comment below what you'd like to see next whether it's on my list or not.

• ?? There's no one size fit's all for "next steps in modernizing an app"
• ?? Managing dependency upgrades
• ?? Tools, oh so many mobile tools
• ?? Simulators, "Real Devices," and Personal Devices, Oh my!
• ?? To Expo or not to Expo?
• ?? Testing? So many choices!
• ?? Fastlane to EAS, Stores...
• ?? Developer Experience and Environment
• ?? HLS, live video/audio, debugging

Sources

[1] https://endoflife.date/ios

[2] https://endoflife.date/android

[3] https://endoflife.date/react-native

[4] https://expo.dev/changelog

[5] https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk

[6] https://xcodereleases.com/

[7] https://nodejs.org/en/about/previous-releases

[8] My year of experience leading a mobile modernization in 2024.