Mobile User Membership Architecture with Mobile Services Backend

Introduction

We have reached to a point where mobile apps have become essential. The two big groups of mobile apps are natives and mobile web apps. There is a separate discussion about which type would make more sense, when that would be the case and why in general. The thing to takeaway is that mobile web app is actually a type of web site. So when talk about user membership architecture, we are essentially talking about user membership for a website. But when we are talking about native apps, the user membership architecture is different from mobile web because of the capabilities a native app contains in itself. In this blog, I am going to focus on the user membership architecture for native app site of mobile world.

Mobile User Membership Architecture

A user membership architecture is a design that shows how a user of an app is formally defined as "User" of that mobile app. The reason I put emphasis on word 'user' is because there is a very essential process that has to take place which will qualify user of an to app to a "User". When the qualification has taken place then the "User" is now identifiable as an entity to the Mobile Service Backend. To understand that let us take a scenario where you have developed an App and distributed the App to the market. To user that App, anyone can download the app and use it. The App does not know anything about the user. On top of that the Mobile Services Backend does not know anything about the user of the App either. So when the Mobile Services Backend does not know about the user then there is no analytics related to users of the app. Also, if you wanted to have a provisioning feature in the app, you cannot do that because there is no distinction between the users. So User Management Architecture is the path that you an use to define and qualify a user of an App. 

The main components of Mobile User Membership Architecture are:

• User creation or signing up process
• User authentication process
• Mechanism for user logging in
• User logging out mechanism
• Mechanism to retrieve/reset user password or any other property of user entity
• Optional: Mechanism to let anonymous user to log in
• Optional: If anonymous user is allowed then there should be mechanism to convert them to regular users if requirement exists

Fig. Mobile User Membership Architecture

Conclusion

User membership is way too important to be ignored for any mobile device app. This is a vast field. In this post I have tried to explain in simple terms what choices we have. But there are more details and intricacies that are in the play for user management on mobile devices. This post gave you a high level introduction. In my subsequent post, I will try to go in more detail for each of the components and explain with code examples. Stay tuned.

One of the great ways to acquire knowledge is to share knowledge. Please do share your experience and knowledge by commenting so we all can better design great mobile applications.