Understanding mobile networking

Working with the network is a crucial part of developing apps for iOS. Understanding how the network fits into our app architecture is essential, but what does it mean? Watching simple tutorials about performing a URLSession request is fine, but real-world apps don’t work that way.

Before we dive any deeper, let’s recap what a basic app architecture looks like:

• UI layer: This is responsible for presenting UI to the user, including responding to user inputs. The UI layer consists of the SwiftUI/UIKit views and view models.
• Business logic: This is responsible for manipulating data while managing the basic application logic.
• Data layer: This is responsible for storing and retrieving data entities related to the business logic.

I guess I’m not surprising you here with this three-layer architecture, as most mobile apps work in a similar architecture.

When we begin to understand where the network job fits,...