Before founding-engineer life, I built mobile products at Swiggy. Different pressure: messy networks, old devices, release trains that don't pause for elegant abstractions.
Three things stuck.
Your happy path is a rounding error. Empty states, double-taps, and degraded modes are the feature.
Abstractions layers earn rent or they die. At scale, every unnecessary layer becomes divergent iOS/Android behavior.
A mobile release isn't a deploy: it lives on people's phones. Flags, staged rollouts, and crash analytics aren't "platform work." They're part of shipping.
Startups don't have that traffic. They still have production. Treat the last 5% as the product, not cleanup after the demo.
