Written by Technical Team | Last updated 13.02.2026 | 13 minute read
Mobile apps rarely fail because a team can’t write features. They fail because the codebase can’t keep accepting features at the speed the business demands. Architecture patterns exist to slow down chaos: they give you a consistent way to organise UI, state, domain logic, and data access so that changes remain predictable as the app grows.
The tricky part is that “best architecture” is not a universal truth. MVC can feel delightfully straightforward for a small, UI-led product, while MVVM can be a lifesaver when you need testable presentation logic and strong separation between views and behaviour. MVI shines when your app is essentially a collection of state machines with complex user journeys. Clean Architecture is the long-game approach when the domain matters, requirements evolve, and multiple platforms or interfaces are likely.
Before comparing patterns, it helps to define what “good architecture” actually buys you: clearer ownership of responsibilities, safer refactoring, easier onboarding, and higher confidence when you ship. Most importantly, it reduces the cost of change. If your architecture makes changes expensive, it will eventually become the bottleneck that dictates what the product can and cannot become.
When teams discuss MVC, MVVM, MVI, and Clean Architecture, they often talk past each other because they’re optimising for different constraints. Some are optimising for simplicity and speed. Others are optimising for testability and change tolerance. Others are optimising for deterministic state and reliability. This article compares the four patterns through the lens of mobile realities: offline data, flaky networks, background execution, device constraints, frequent UI changes, and the need to ship iteratively without rewriting the app every year.
A practical way to anchor the comparison is to look at the same questions for each approach: where does state live, how does the UI get updated, what is easy to test, where do side effects go, and how do you stop “just one quick change” from turning into long-term technical debt.
MVC (Model–View–Controller) is usually the first architecture pattern mobile developers encounter, and for good reason: it maps neatly to how people think about apps. A view shows UI, a controller reacts to user input, and a model represents data. In practice, mobile MVC is less a strict blueprint and more a family of interpretations shaped by platform conventions.
On iOS, MVC historically aligned with UIKit, where view controllers became the central place for UI and event handling. On Android, you might see “MVC-like” approaches where Activities or Fragments serve as controllers. On cross-platform stacks, MVC often appears as a simple split between “UI layer” and “logic layer”, even if the naming differs. The core idea remains: the controller coordinates between the view and the model.
The strength of MVC in mobile is momentum. It’s widely understood, easy to start with, and encourages a direct mental model of screen behaviour. For small apps, prototypes, internal tools, and early-stage products where requirements are volatile, MVC can be the quickest path to something shippable. Its simplicity is not a weakness when the problem is still small enough to fit in your head.
Where MVC frequently breaks down is in the “controller” becoming a magnet for responsibilities. Mobile controllers often handle navigation, lifecycle events, permissions, analytics, data fetching, caching decisions, input validation, error mapping, and UI state transitions. This is how you end up with the classic “Massive View Controller” or “God Activity” problem. The pattern doesn’t force that outcome, but it doesn’t strongly prevent it either, especially when the platform nudges you towards dumping logic in UI host classes.
Modernising MVC usually means shrinking the controller and pushing decisions outward. If you keep MVC, you typically want a thin controller that translates UI events into calls to services or use-cases, and then renders results. You also want to define “model” more carefully: in mobile, a model might be a domain entity, a UI model, or a data transfer object—each with different responsibilities. When those roles are blurred, controllers fill the gap with mapping logic, and complexity rises.
A pragmatic MVC evolution for mobile is to treat the controller as a coordinator and introduce dedicated collaborators: formatters, validators, interactors/use-cases, repositories, and navigation routers. This isn’t “pure MVC” anymore, but it’s often the right compromise: keep the familiarity of MVC while preventing controllers from swallowing your app.
The biggest risk with MVC is not that it’s “wrong”; it’s that it lulls teams into thinking they have an architecture when they really have a file structure. If the controller is where everything happens, your app becomes hard to test, hard to refactor, and fragile under change. If you choose MVC, do it consciously—and put guardrails in place early.
MVVM (Model–View–ViewModel) exists to address the pain that MVC often creates: UI classes becoming too powerful. The ViewModel’s job is to hold presentation logic and expose state in a way that the view can render without knowing why the state is the way it is. In mobile terms, MVVM typically means the view observes ViewModel state and renders it, while user actions are routed back into the ViewModel.
The most important thing to understand about MVVM is that it’s not just about splitting files; it’s about changing the direction of dependency. The view depends on the ViewModel, but the ViewModel should not depend on the view. That separation is what makes unit tests meaningful: you can test presentation behaviour without a device, without UI automation, and without the brittle nature of end-to-end tests. For mobile teams, this can be a major productivity multiplier.
MVVM tends to pair naturally with reactive or observable paradigms. Whether you’re using streams, observable properties, coroutines/flows, Combine, Rx, or a declarative UI framework, MVVM thrives when the view reacts to state changes rather than being imperatively “told” what to do. This is one reason MVVM became especially popular alongside modern UI approaches that encourage unidirectional flow and state-driven rendering.
However, MVVM comes with its own traps. A ViewModel can become a “second controller” if boundaries aren’t clear. When ViewModels start handling navigation directly, orchestrating multi-step flows, owning large state graphs, and performing heavy mapping between data and UI, they can become just as bloated as the controllers they replaced. The pattern fixes one gravitational centre only to create another.
A good MVVM implementation defines the ViewModel as a state and behaviour provider, not a universal coordinator. Navigation is often better handled by a separate coordinator/router layer. Data access should be abstracted behind repositories or services. Domain decisions should live in use-cases. The ViewModel then composes these pieces, maps domain results to UI-ready state, and exposes events or commands the view can observe.
One subtle MVVM challenge in mobile is handling ephemeral, one-off UI events: snackbars, toasts, navigation triggers, and permission prompts. If you model everything as “state”, one-off events can repeat after configuration changes or lifecycle events. If you model everything as “events”, you can lose determinism. Strong MVVM implementations define clear rules: persistent screen state is observable state; transient actions are events with consumption semantics.
MVVM is a strong default when you want a clean separation between UI and logic without going full framework-heavy. It scales well to medium and large apps, especially when teams agree on consistent patterns for state, events, mapping, and navigation. It’s not the only way to build a robust app, but it provides a practical balance between structure and speed.
MVI (Model–View–Intent) is often described as MVVM with stricter rules and a heavier emphasis on unidirectional data flow. The key promise of MVI is predictability: given the same starting state and the same sequence of inputs, your screen state should evolve in the same way every time. In mobile apps—where lifecycle complexity and asynchronous events are constant—that promise is extremely appealing.
The “Intent” in MVI is not necessarily literal user intent; it’s better thought of as any input that should influence state: user interactions, lifecycle triggers, external events, push notifications, timers, and data refreshes. These intents are processed by a reducer (or similar mechanism) that produces a new immutable state. The view renders that state, and side effects (like network calls) are handled in a controlled way.
This approach changes how you think about UI screens. Instead of writing imperative code that says “show loading, fetch data, then hide loading and show results”, you define a state model that includes loading, results, error, and empty. Intents trigger transitions, and the reducer updates state accordingly. The view becomes almost dumb: it maps state to UI. This can drastically reduce UI bugs caused by timing issues and partial updates.
MVI tends to be a strong fit for complex flows: checkout funnels, onboarding, multi-step forms, dashboards with multiple asynchronous sources, and screens that must handle retries, refreshes, pagination, and offline scenarios gracefully. Because state is explicit and transitions are controlled, it’s easier to reason about edge cases. When a bug is reported, you can often reproduce it by replaying a sequence of intents and observing state changes.
The cost of MVI is ceremony. You need to define intents, state models, reducers, and effect handlers. For simple screens, that can feel like overengineering. There’s also a learning curve: teams must be disciplined about immutability, avoiding hidden state, and keeping side effects out of reducers. If that discipline slips, you can end up with “MVI-shaped code” that isn’t actually predictable.
Side effects are the most common point of divergence in MVI implementations. Some teams introduce an “Effect” or “Result” layer where intents trigger effects, effects produce results, and results are reduced into state. Others allow the ViewModel/store to orchestrate effects and then dispatch results. The implementation details vary, but the principle is constant: side effects must be visible, testable, and not hidden inside UI rendering code.
MVI also tends to shine in teams that value strong testing. Because the reducer is a pure function from (state, input) to new state, it becomes easy to unit test many behaviours quickly. When you treat screen logic as a state machine, tests become crisp: given a start state and an intent, expect the next state and expected effects. This can significantly reduce reliance on UI automation for correctness.
MVI is not the “next step after MVVM” in a hierarchy; it’s a different philosophy. Choose it when predictability and state correctness are more important than minimising boilerplate, and when your screens behave more like reactive systems than simple forms.
Clean Architecture is often discussed alongside MVC/MVVM/MVI, but it’s different in scope. MVC, MVVM, and MVI are primarily presentation architectures: they describe how UI, state, and user interaction are structured. Clean Architecture is a broader approach to structuring the entire application so that business rules are independent of frameworks, UI, and data sources.
The core idea is to organise code around policies (business rules) rather than details (libraries and platforms). Your domain model and use-cases should not care whether the app is built with UIKit, Compose, SwiftUI, Flutter, or React Native. They should not care whether data comes from a REST API, GraphQL, local database, or a cached file. Those details are pushed to the edges, behind abstractions.
In a typical mobile Clean Architecture setup, you’ll see layers such as domain (entities, value objects, use-cases), data (repositories, data sources, mappers), and presentation (screens, ViewModels/stores, UI models). Dependencies point inward: presentation depends on domain, data depends on domain, and domain depends on nothing. This is not merely a diagram; it’s a practical rule that prevents UI and frameworks from leaking into the core logic that you most want to protect.
The big win is change tolerance. When product strategy changes, the domain often remains, but the presentation and data mechanisms change. Clean Architecture aims to make those changes less risky by centralising business behaviour and keeping it framework-agnostic. It also supports multi-interface products: the same domain can power a mobile app, a web app, and even a background service, with different delivery mechanisms.
Clean Architecture also encourages explicit boundaries: where validation happens, where business rules live, where data mapping happens, and where side effects are triggered. For mobile teams, this can eliminate the ambiguity that causes architecture drift. When everyone knows where a piece of logic belongs, code reviews become sharper and refactoring becomes safer.
The cost is that you must build and maintain the boundaries. You’ll write interfaces, mappers, and models that feel like “extra” code—until the app grows. Teams can also misuse Clean Architecture as an excuse to create layers for everything, leading to an over-abstracted maze. The goal is not to add layers; it’s to create stable seams where change is expected.
Clean Architecture is also not a replacement for MVC/MVVM/MVI; it can sit with them. You might use MVVM in the presentation layer while adopting Clean Architecture for the overall application structure. You might use MVI for complex screens while the domain is cleanly separated into use-cases and entities. In practice, the most maintainable mobile apps often blend a presentation pattern with a domain-first layering strategy.
A useful way to end the comparison is to treat these options as levers. MVC, MVVM, and MVI are about how you manage UI interaction and state. Clean Architecture is about how you protect the domain and control dependencies across the whole system. If your app is small and UI-led, a cleanly executed MVVM or even a disciplined MVC may be perfect. If your app is complex and state-heavy, MVI can bring order. If your app is business-rule-heavy and long-lived, Clean Architecture can stop your domain from being held hostage by framework decisions.
Ultimately, the best architecture is the one your team can apply consistently under deadline pressure. A simple pattern followed well beats a sophisticated pattern followed poorly. Pick the approach that matches your product’s complexity, your team’s maturity, and the kind of change you expect over the next 12–24 months—and build the guardrails that keep the codebase honest as it grows.
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