API Integration Best Practices for Mobile Apps
Designing for Unreliable Networks
Graceful degradation and adaptive requests
Detect network quality and adapt: reduce image sizes, lower polling frequency, and prioritize critical endpoints. Tune timeouts per route, implement jittered backoff, and provide sensible fallbacks. Tell users what’s happening in human language, and invite feedback about where responsiveness matters most in your app.
Security and Authentication Done Right
OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect for mobile
Prefer the authorization code flow with PKCE, using the system browser or secure WebAuth UI. Avoid embedding client secrets. Validate nonce and state, rotate keys, and pin redirects. If you’ve migrated from implicit to PKCE, share what surprised you and what instantly improved your support queue.
Secure token storage and refresh cycles
Store tokens in the device Keychain or Keystore, never in plaintext preferences. Use short‑lived access tokens with refresh tokens, and revoke on suspicious signals. Rate‑limit refresh attempts and protect against replay. Subscribe for our upcoming checklist on bulletproof token lifecycles for iOS and Android.
Protecting sensitive data and compliance
Encrypt in transit with TLS 1.2+ and certificate pinning where appropriate. Minimize PII, redact logs, and respect regional data residency. Map data flows for GDPR or HIPAA, and add consent UX that’s understandable. Have compliance tips that didn’t hurt UX? Drop them below to help the community.
Performance and Payload Efficiency
Replace chatty sequences with batched endpoints where safe, and paginate with stable cursors. Deduplicate inflight requests, coalesce identical calls, and prefetch likely data. Users feel speed when above‑the‑fold content arrives first—share your favorite trick for making first paint feel instant.
Performance and Payload Efficiency
Negotiate gzip or Brotli, trim overfetching with sparse fieldsets or GraphQL, and consider Protobuf for binary‑friendly data. Normalize images and thumbnails server‑side. Validate that savings outweigh complexity. Tell us whether GraphQL or REST served you better for payload control and why.
Retries with backoff and idempotency keys
Use exponential backoff with jitter and cap retries to preserve battery. Employ idempotency keys for critical writes like payments, preventing duplicates under flakiness. An anecdote: a commuter‑train outage once doubled orders—idempotency saved refunds. Share your resilience wins and lessons.
Meaningful error surfaces for users
Translate cryptic codes into helpful messages with actionable next steps. Offer retry buttons, offline queues, or contact links when appropriate. Record technical details silently for diagnostics while keeping user copy kind. What phrasing improved trust in your app? Tell us your wording tweaks.
Logging, tracing, and mobile telemetry
Correlate client requests with server traces via request IDs, and capture spans for slow endpoints. Sample wisely to protect performance and privacy. Monitor battery, data usage, and latency by network type. Want our OpenTelemetry starter kit for mobile? Subscribe and we’ll send it first.
Testing and Release Discipline
Specify schemas with OpenAPI or gRPC and validate consumer contracts automatically. Use mock servers and snapshots to stabilize UI tests. Break the build on incompatible changes long before release. Share your favorite contract‑testing tool and how it changed your team’s confidence.
Testing and Release Discipline
Run integration suites on real devices with network shaping for 2G, 3G, and captive portals. Seed synthetic data and verify edge cases. Compare cold versus warm starts. Curious about a reusable test matrix we use? Comment below and we’ll package it for subscribers.
