Improving Mobile Development Efficiency: Practices from Hello Ride

On October 21, Umeng+ held a Mobile Internet Development Efficiency and Practice Forum at the Yunqi Conference. Industry experts discussed current technical efficiency challenges and business pain points in mobile applications, offering solutions based on methodology and real‑world cases.

Chen Xiaohui, Senior Technical Expert at Hello Ride, presented "Mobile R&D Efficiency Practices at Hello" and explained how a combination of people and technology can improve efficiency and performance across many business lines.

Hello Ride, founded in 2016, expanded from shared bicycles to a diversified platform covering two‑wheel, four‑wheel, travel, and in‑store services. Rapid business growth created challenges for the development team, such as resource allocation, unbalanced personnel across platforms, and long communication chains.

To address these issues, Hello Ride focuses on three pillars: process linking, demand efficiency, and technical upgrades.

Process Linking – Instead of relying solely on architects and technical experts, Hello Ride empowers technical PMs to act as bridges between business, architecture, and technology. Technical PMs take on semi‑architect roles, understand the full business chain, and facilitate cross‑team collaboration.

Demand Efficiency – The company emphasizes the value of each requirement, ensuring product teams communicate not only the need but also its business impact. This improves developers' sense of ownership and streamlines decision‑making.

Technical Upgrades – Hello Ride’s architecture upgrade strategy centers on modularization, containerization, and standardization.

Modularization is pursued through service‑oriented abstraction, similar to micro‑service autonomy, allowing flexible interfaces and cost‑effective scaling.

Containerization includes exploring Flutter for cross‑platform development. While Flutter can replace native implementations and boost efficiency, it requires careful evaluation due to its early‑stage ecosystem.

Cross‑platform efficiency is achieved by developing once and adapting to multiple endpoints (e.g., independent apps, Alipay mini‑programs), reducing duplicated effort.

Standardization focuses on layering foundational capabilities (network libraries, logging, etc.) with unit and automated tests, and establishing service‑oriented interfaces for mid‑platform and business‑level components. This drives consistent quality as the number of platforms and technology stacks grows.

The overall goal is to reduce costs and increase efficiency by combining people‑centric processes with robust technical solutions.