MobileConfig: Remote Configuration Management for Mobile Apps at Hyperscale
Abstract
While software configuration management is a ubiquitous practice in the industry and has been extensively studied, prior research has focused solely on desktop or server applications. This paper presents MobileConfig, perhaps the world's largest configuration management system for mobile apps. It has been in production since 2015 and manages apps running on billions of devices, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and AR/VR/glasses apps. Every day, Meta's developers make a staggering number of live configuration changes, often in the thousands, to remotely control mobile apps, driving them to change runtime behaviors without requiring app code updates. These configuration changes serve diverse purposes such as A/B testing, feature rollout, and app personalization. We discuss how MobileConfig addresses several challenges unique to mobile environments, including (1) the lack of data consistency models that can simultaneously ensure both fast app startup and configuration data freshness; (2) the risk of misconfiguration impacting billions of app users; and (3) the proliferation of mobile client SDKs needed to support diverse mobile platforms, programming languages, and configuration use cases.