Appendix F. Further reading
This list holds sources that are free to read. It was compiled on 4 October 2026 and the links were not all re-checked after that date, so some may have moved. Company engineering posts are free to read but are not openly licensed. Posts hosted on membership platforms may sit behind a paywall.
The handbook describes designs for generic app types and names no products. The sources here are different: each is a maker describing its own system, which is the strongest evidence there is (see Chapter 5).
The whole subject
Section titled “The whole subject”- weeeBox/mobile-system-design. A framework for mobile system design interviews, with exercises and deep dives on caching, pagination, image loading, navigation, prefetching and resumable uploads.
- yogeshpaliyal/awesome-mobile-system-design. A list of guides, feature designs and app case studies.
- greatfrontend/awesome-front-end-system-design. Client-side system design, which overlaps heavily with mobile.
- donnemartin/system-design-primer. General system design, for the backend side of a teardown.
- C4 model. An approach to drawing software architecture at several levels of detail.
Chapter 10. API shape
Section titled “Chapter 10. API shape”- Slack: How We Design Our APIs
- Instacart: Building the View Model API, Part 1
- Airbnb: Moving 10x Faster with GraphQL and Apollo
Chapter 11. Local storage, caching and prefetching
Section titled “Chapter 11. Local storage, caching and prefetching”- Instagram: Building an Open Source, Carefree Android Disk Cache
- Instagram: Background Data Prefetching
Chapter 12. Offline and sync
Section titled “Chapter 12. Offline and sync”Trello’s series is a complete case study of adding offline support to an existing app:
- Airplane Mode: Enabling Trello Mobile Offline
- Syncing Changes
- Sync Failure Handling
- The Two ID Problem
- Offline Attachments
- Sync is a Two-Way Street
- Displaying Sync State
Also:
- Local-first software (Ink & Switch). The essay that set out local-first principles.
- Expensify/App. A production offline-first app with a documented approach to offline behavior.
- PowerSync documentation. The architecture of a sync engine between backend databases and an on-device database.
Chapter 13. Network transport and resilience
Section titled “Chapter 13. Network transport and resilience”- Uber: How the New Driver App Overcomes Network Lag
- Uber: Failover Handling in Mobile Networking Infrastructure
- Uber: Employing QUIC to Optimize App Performance
- Snap: QUIC at Snapchat
Chapter 14. Real-time delivery
Section titled “Chapter 14. Real-time delivery”Chapter 15. Lists, feeds and pagination
Section titled “Chapter 15. Lists, feeds and pagination”Chapter 18. File transfer: uploads and downloads
Section titled “Chapter 18. File transfer: uploads and downloads”Chapter 30. Remote config and experiments
Section titled “Chapter 30. Remote config and experiments”Chapter 31. Server-driven UI
Section titled “Chapter 31. Server-driven UI”- Airbnb: A Deep Dive into Airbnb’s Server-Driven UI System
- DoorDash: Generic, Server-Driven UI Components
- Uber Freight: Lists of Modular, Reusable Components
- Mobile Native Foundation: Server-driven UI strategies
Chapter 32. UI technology: native, cross-platform and web
Section titled “Chapter 32. UI technology: native, cross-platform and web”Chapter 36. Constrained devices and networks
Section titled “Chapter 36. Constrained devices and networks”- Facebook Lite
- Uber Lite
- Spotify Lite, One Year Later
- Microsoft Teams: Designing for Emerging Markets
Chapter 38. Modularity, SDKs and team scale
Section titled “Chapter 38. Modularity, SDKs and team scale”- Uber: The Journey to Android Monorepo
- Airbnb: Designing for Productivity in a Large-Scale iOS Application
- Mobile Native Foundation: Monorepo discussion