The 53 Concepts for Highly Effective Mobile System Design

A comprehensive guide covering 19 foundational concepts for mobile system design, organized into networking and caching categories. Topics include client-server architecture (thick vs thin clients), WebSockets for real-time communication, push notifications via APNs and FCM, polling/long polling/SSE tradeoffs, REST vs GraphQL vs gRPC API design, exponential backoff and retry strategies, idempotency keys for safe retries, request batching and payload optimization, resumable chunked uploads, handling intermittent connectivity with optimistic UI and request queuing, on-device memory and disk caching, HTTP caching with ETags and Cache-Control headers, offline-first architecture, and CDN strategy with media optimization. Each concept includes real-world examples, tradeoffs, and practical advice tailored to mobile constraints like battery, bandwidth, and unstable networks.