Jan 2025
Technical debt isn’t just about code quality. Here’s what we’ve learned from real teams about how technical debt actually works in practice.
We’ve all had that moment. You’re staring at work you did months ago and wondering: “What was I thinking?” Some call it technical debt. Others call it the price of shipping.
Through conversations with designers and engineers who’ve scaled systems from humble MVPs to massive platforms, we’ve uncovered something surprising: the true cost of technical debt ripples far beyond your codebase, impacting everything from design decisions to team dynamics.
Will Helling, InspiringApps’ Lead iOS Engineer, faced what could have been a nightmare scenario. “We had one project that used a particular data source at the very beginning,“ he explains. “We ended up changing the data source for that particular application five or six times.“
In most codebases, this would be a disaster. But there’s a twist to this story. “All we really had to do was create a new file and fill in that contract, and we were good to go,“ says Helling. “Everything worked the exact same as expected.“
When we see two screens that look similar, creating a shared component is tempting. Reusable components make sense for core UI elements like buttons, form inputs, and cards—these are the building blocks of our interfaces that benefit from consistency and central maintenance.
But similarity can be deceptive. Take two confirmation dialogs that look identical today. If one dialog handles item deletion and another handles account settings changes, they might evolve in very different directions as requirements change—one might need extra security checks while the other needs to show affected items.
The most successful component strategies focus on finding the right boundaries. Strategic components build on system-level patterns—things like input fields, buttons, and layout primitives that are genuinely reusable. They stay focused on solving one problem well.
The secret? Build a strong foundation of truly reusable components, but don’t force-fit functionality that wants to be different. Let your component library evolve through real usage patterns, not theoretical reuse.
Good technical decisions often look like overengineering at first. Take data abstraction—creating clean interfaces between your data sources and business logic feels like extra work when you only have one data source. But this seemingly unnecessary abstraction becomes invaluable when requirements change.
Mobile apps particularly benefit from this forward-thinking approach. When connectivity is unreliable, offline support becomes necessary, or APIs change, having clean data abstractions already in place can save months of refactoring.
“We’ll fix it later” can be a cognitive bias in action. We just think, “Let’s get it done quickly.” But then it becomes harder to go back and ensure you’re actually doing it properly.
When faced with similar but not identical features, we have two paths forward. We can keep implementations separate, allowing them to evolve independently or create shared abstractions that handle both cases. Over time, these paths diverge dramatically:
Mobile development has a unique psychological burden: users expect native apps to feel magical. This creates an interesting technical debt dynamic. Performance must feel instant, network operations must be invisible, and data must appear always available—even offline.
These expectations force mobile developers to take on technical debt differently than web developers. What might be optional features for the web become fundamental architectural requirements for mobile. Caching, background sync, and UI updates are typically must-haves.
This challenges traditional technical debt calculations. The additional code and complexity needed to maintain the illusion of simplicity are akin to basic functionality or technical “credits.” Sometimes, you must take on complexity early to meet these psychological expectations.
Good technical decisions often look boring at first. In mobile development, where every pixel counts, there’s a constant temptation to customize everything. But here’s the counterintuitive truth: the more we standardize the basics, the more resources we have to perfect what makes our apps unique.
The most successful apps blend standard patterns with thoughtful customization. Using standard designs and code for common interactions helps reduce design and development time and maintenance overhead. This lets us focus our energy on polishing the features that truly define the product experience.
Watch out for the word “just“ in technical discussions. It’s often a red flag for hidden complexity and future pain. “Just change the button color” sounds simple until six months later when that custom button needs to work across platforms, support different states, and match an evolving design system.
We hear it all the time: “Just add caching,“ “Just move it to a service,“ and “Just abstract the interface.” Each “just“ makes a complex architectural decision sound deceptively simple. What starts as “just a red door” becomes “a red door that needs to match our design system, work with dark mode, support accessibility features, and maintain platform-specific behaviors.”
Every time you copy-paste code or create a custom variant, you’re not saving time—you’re taking out a high-interest loan where the future “you” has to pay back every instance with interest. And the interest compounds. Daily.
When we talk about technical debt, we often focus on code complexity. But its real impact ripples far beyond the codebase, especially when requirements change—and they always change.
Take that custom button. Initially, it might be just a few lines of code. But as the product evolves, that decision cascades: designers need to document its unique behavior, every UI update requires special handling, new team members need context about why it’s different, cross-platform implementations grow complex, and testing expands to cover edge cases.
As InspiringApps’ Creative Director, Aaron Lea, puts it: “Sometimes it seems so trivial... but after a while, that starts compounding. You realize you have to explain why you made that change six reasons back.”
These hidden costs grow with each iteration. What started as a quick customization becomes a friction point that slows future development. Before you know it, a “simple” change requires coordination across design, development, and QA teams.
This compounding effect means customization decisions should factor in their full organizational impact. A quick technical fix that creates ongoing design and maintenance overhead may cost far more than a cleaner, standardized solution that takes longer initially. Sometimes, the best technical decision isn’t to customize at all.
Technical debt isn’t a moral failing or a sign of poor engineering. It’s a natural result of writing software in an uncertain world. The goal isn’t to eliminate technical debt—it’s to manage it intentionally.
Every product team takes on technical debt. The key is knowing which debt will power your growth versus which will slow you down:
Strategic debt emerges from intentional, forward-thinking choices. It starts with MVP focus—deliberately simplifying implementations to validate ideas quickly. These decisions are protected by clear interfaces that create well-defined boundaries, isolating and containing the technical debt. Strategic debt comes with clear upgrade routes established before the debt is even taken on.
Problematic debt can sneak in through seemingly innocent choices. Copy-paste code might feel like a quick win, but it creates duplicated logic, becoming a maintenance nightmare as each copy must be updated independently. “Just”-driven decisions slow down future work and make changes riskier. Tight coupling causes systems to become so intertwined that even small changes have unpredictable ripple effects, making modifications increasingly cost-intensive.
Good technical decisions come from understanding the real cost of change in your system, knowing which parts are likely to evolve, and building interfaces that protect you from your own wrong assumptions.
The best code isn’t always the cleanest or most elegant. It could be the code that gives you room to be wrong.
Next time you’re making a technical decision, ask yourself:
In the end, technical debt is like coding’s version of entropy; it’s not a bug in the system; it’s a feature of building software in an uncertain world. The best teams don’t aim for perfect code. They aim for code that gives them room to be wrong while keeping the cost of mistakes manageable. Sometimes, a strategic shortcut today creates the space for a breakthrough tomorrow.
The difference between strategic and problematic technical debt isn’t in the code—it’s in knowing which corners are worth cutting and which ones will cut you back. It’s the ability to do simple things simply and prioritize the customizations that truly define your product.
InspiringApps: A Business Perspective on Building Mobile Apps was written to help you evaluate ideas and turn the best ones into a genuinely successful app for use within your company or for consumer sale.
Get the eBook
