Configuration Service for Mobile Apps

Abstract

Keeping pace with the market requires software to be shipped quickly, in rapid release cycles with a strong feedback loop. Managing and controlling these changes become complex, especially in the mobile world. In mobile applications, unlike in the Web world, the user chooses whether to download updates or to ignore them, and rollbacks are typically not an option. This paper describes a centralized service that supports managing configuration changes for mobile applications and their backend systems. We describe which implementation decisions we took for our configuration service and how the service was used to support context-based customization of the applications based on user segmentation.