iOS Architecture Patterns – iOS App Development – Medium 13/6/19 15(46

iOS Architecture Patterns

Demystifying MVC, MVP, MVVM and VIPER

Bohdan Orlov Follow

Nov 28, 2015 · 14 min read

Don’t miss the iOS Developer Roadmap for 2018!

UPD: Slides which I presented at NSLondon available here.

Feeling weird while doing MVC in iOS? Have doubts about switching to
MVVM? Heard about VIPER, but not sure if it worth it?

Keep reading, and you will Dnd answers to questions above, if you don’t 
— feel free to complain in comments.

You are about to structure your knowledge about architectural patterns

in iOS environment. We’ll brieMy review some popular ones and
compare them in theory and practice going over a few tiny examples.
Follow links if you need more details about any particular one.

Mastering design patterns might be addictive, so beware: you might end up

asking yourself more questions now than before reading this article, like

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these:

Who supposed to own networking request: a Model or a Controller?

How do I pass a Model into a View Model of a new View?

Who creates a new VIPER module: Router or Presenter?

. . .

Why care about choosing the architecture?

Because if you don’t, one day, debugging a huge class with dozens
diQerent things, you’ll Dnd yourself being unable to Dnd and Dx any bugs
in your class.”. Naturally, it is hard to keep this class in mind as whole
entity, thus, you’ll always be missing some important details. If you are
already in this situation with your application, it is very likely that:

• This class is the UIViewController subclass.

• Your data stored directly in the UIViewController

• Your UIViews do almost nothing

• The Model is a dumb data structure

• Your Unit Tests cover nothing

And this can happen, even despite the fact that you are following Apple’s
guidelines and implementing Apple’s MVC pattern, so don’t feel bad.

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There is something wrong with the Apple’s MVC, but we’ll get back to it
later.

Let’s deDne features of a good architecture:

1. Balanced distribution of responsibilities among entities with strict

roles.

2. Testability usually comes from the Drst feature (and don’t worry: it
is easy with appropriate architecture).

3. Ease of use and a low maintenance cost.

Why Distribution?
Distribution keeps a fair load on our brain while we trying to Dgure out
how things work. If you think the more you develop the better your brain
will adapt to understanding complexity, then you are right. But this
ability doesn’t scale linearly and reaches the cap very quickly. So the
easiest way to defeat complexity is to divide responsibilities among
multiple entities following the single responsibility principle.

Why Testability?
This is usually not a question for those who already felt gratitude to unit
tests, which failed after adding new features or due to refactoring some
intricacies of the class. This means the tests saved those developers from
Dnding issues in runtime, which might happen when an app is on a
user’s device and the Dx takes a week to reach the user.

Why Ease of use?

This does not require an answer but it is worth mentioning that the best
code is the code that has never been written. Therefore the less code
you have, the less bugs you have. This means that desire to write less
code should never be explained solely by laziness of a developer, and
you should not favour a smarter solution closing your eyes to its
maintenance cost.

. . .

MV(X) essentials
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MV(X) essentials
Nowadays we have many options when it comes to architecture design
patterns:

• MVC

• MVP

• MVVM

• VIPER

First three of them assume putting the entities of the app into one of 3
categories:

• Models — responsible for the domain data or a data access layer

which manipulates the data, think of ‘Person’ or
‘PersonDataProvider’ classes.

• Views — responsible for the presentation layer (GUI), for iOS

environment think of everything starting with ‘UI’ preDx.

• Controller/Presenter/ViewModel — the glue or the mediator

between the Model and the View, in general responsible for
altering the Model by reacting to the user’s actions performed on
the View and updating the View with changes from the Model.

Having entities divided allows us to:

• understand them better (as we already know)

• reuse them (mostly applicable to the View and the Model)

• test them independently

Let’s start with MV(X) patterns and get back to VIPER later.

MVC

How it used to be

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Before discussing Apple’s vision of MVC let’s have a look on the

traditional one.

In this case, the View is stateless. It is

simply rendered by the Controller
once the Model is changed. Think of
the web page completely reloaded
once you press on the link to navigate
somewhere else. Although it is
Traditional MVC possible to implement the traditional
MVC in iOS application, it doesn’t
make much sense due to the architectural problem — all three entities
are tightly coupled, each entity knows about the other two. This
dramatically reduces reusability of each of them — that is not what you
want to have in your application. For this reason, we skip even trying to
write a canonical MVC example.

Traditional MVC doesn't seems to be applicable to modern iOS development.

Apple’s MVC

Expectation

The Controller is a mediator between

the View and the Model so that they
don’t know about each other. The
least reusable is the Controller and
this is usually Dne for us, since we
must have a place for all that tricky
Cocoa MVC business logic that doesn’t Dt into the
Model.

In theory, it looks very straightforward, but you feel that something is

wrong, right? You even heard people unabbreviating MVC as the
Massive View Controller. Moreover, view controller oaoading became
an important topic for the iOS developers. Why does this happen if Apple
just took the traditional MVC and improved it a bit?

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Apple’s MVC

Reality

Realistic Cocoa MVC

Cocoa MVC encourages you to write Massive View Controllers, because

they are so involved in View’s life cycle that it’s hard to say they are
separate. Although you still have ability to oaoad some of the business
logic and data transformation to the Model, you don’t have much choice
when it comes to oaoading work to the View, at most of times all the
responsibility of the View is to send actions to the Controller. The view
controller ends up being a delegate and a data source of everything, and
is usually responsible for dispatching and cancelling the network
requests and… you name it.

How many times have you seen code like this:

❤
1 var userCell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier
2 userCell.configureWithUser(user)

MVCCellProblem.swift hosted with by GitHub view raw

The cell, which is the View conDgured directly with the Model, so MVC
guidelines are violated, but this happens all the time, and usually people
don’t feel it is wrong. If you strictly follow the MVC, then you supposed

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to conDgure the cell from the controller, and don’t pass the Model into
the View, and this will increase the size of your Controller even more.

Cocoa MVC is reasonably unabbreviated as the Massive View Controller.

The problem might not be evident until it comes to the Unit Testing
(hopefully, it does in your project). Since your view controller is tightly
coupled with the view, it becomes didcult to test because you have to be
very creative in mocking views and their life cycle, while writing the
view controller’s code in such a way, that your business logic is separated
as much as possible from the view layout code.

Let’s have a look on the simple playground example:

UPD: See updated code examples by Wasin Thonkaew

1 import UIKit
2
3 struct Person { // Model
4 let firstName: String
5 let lastName: String
6 }
7

MVC example

MVC assembling can be performed in the presenting view controller

This doesn’t seem very testable, right? We can move generation of

greeting into the new GreetingModel class and test it separately, but we
can’t test any presentation logic (although there is not much of such
logic in the example above) inside the GreetingViewController without
calling the UIView related methods directly (viewDidLoad,
didTapButton) which might cause loading all views, and this is bad for
the unit testing.

In fact, loading and testing UIViews on one simulator (e.g. iPhone 4S)
doesn’t guarantee that it would work Dne on the other devices (e.g.
iPad), so I’d recommend to remove “Host Application” from your Unit

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Test target conDguration and run your tests without your application
running on simulator.

The interactions between the View and the Controller aren’t really testable
with Unit Tests

With all that said, it might seems that Cocoa MVC is a pretty bad pattern
to choose. But let’s assess it in terms of features deDned in the beginning
of the article:

• Distribution — the View and the Model in fact separated, but the

View and the Controller are tightly coupled.

• Testability — due to the bad distribution you’ll probably only test

your Model.

• Ease of use — the least amount of code among others patterns. In

addition everyone is familiar with it, thus, it’s easily maintained
even by the unexperienced developers.

Cocoa MVC is the pattern of your choice if you are not ready to invest
more time in your architecture, and you feel that something with higher
maintenance cost is an overkill for your tiny pet project.

Cocoa MVC is the best architectural pattern in terms of the speed of the
development.

MVP

Cocoa MVC’s promises delivered

Passive View variant of MVP

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Doesn’t it look exactly like the Apple’s MVC? Yes, it does, and it’s name is
MVP (Passive View variant). But wait a minute… Does this mean that
Apple’s MVC is in fact a MVP? No, its not, because if you recall, there, the
View is tightly coupled with the Controller, while the MVP’s mediator,
Presenter, has nothing to do with the life cycle of the view controller,
and the View can be mocked easily, so there is no layout code in the
Presenter at all, but it is responsible for updating the View with data
and state.

What if I told you, the UIViewController is the View.

In terms of the MVP, the UIViewController subclasses are in fact the

Views and not the Presenters. This distinction provides superb
testability, which comes at cost of the development speed, because you
have to make manual data and event binding, as you can see from the
example:

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1 import UIKit
2
3 struct Person { // Model
4 let firstName: String
5 let lastName: String
6 }
7

MVP example

Important note regarding assembly

The MVP is the Drst pattern that reveals the assembly problem which
happens due to having three actually separate layers. Since we don’t
want the View to know about the Model, it is not right to perform
assembly in presenting view controller (which is the View), thus we
have to do it somewhere else. For example, we can make the app-wide
Router service which will be responsible for performing assembly and
the View-to-View presentation. This issue arises and has to be addressed
not only in the MVP but also in all the following patterns.

Let’s look on the features of the MVP:

• Distribution — we have the most of responsibilities divided

between the Presenter and the Model, with the pretty dumb View
(in the example above the Model is dumb as well).

• Testability — is excellent, we can test most of the business logic due

to the dumb View.

• Easy of use — in our unrealistically simple example, the amount of

code is doubled compared to the MVC, but at the same time, idea of
the MVP is very clear.

MVP in iOS means superb testability and a lot of code.

MVP

With Bindings and Hooters

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There is the other Mavour of the MVP — the Supervising Controller MVP.

This variant includes direct binding of the View and the Model while the
Presenter (The Supervising Controller) still handles actions from the
View and is capable of changing the View.

But as we have already learned

before, vague responsibility
separation is bad, as well as tight
coupling of the View and the Model.
That is similar to how things work in
Cocoa desktop development.
Supervising Presenter variant of the MVP
Same as with the traditional MVC, I
don’t see a point in writing an example for the Mawed architecture.

MVVM

The latest and the greatest of the MV(X) kind

The MVVM is the newest of MV(X) kind thus, let’s hope it emerged
taking into account problems MV(X) was facing previously.

In theory the Model-View-ViewModel looks very good. The View and

the Model are already familiar to us, but also the Mediator, represented
as the View Model.

MVVM

It is pretty similar to the MVP:

• the MVVM treats the view controller as the View

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• There is no tight coupling between the View and the Model

In addition, it does binding like the Supervising version of the MVP;

however, this time not between the View and the Model, but between
the View and the View Model.

So what is the View Model in the iOS reality? It is basically UIKit

independent representation of your View and its state. The View Model
invokes changes in the Model and updates itself with the updated
Model, and since we have a binding between the View and the View
Model, the Drst is updated accordingly.

Bindings
I brieMy mentioned them in the MVP part, but let’s discuss them a bit
here. Bindings come out of box for the OS X development, but we don’t
have them in the iOS toolbox. Of course we have the KVO and
notiDcations, but they aren’t as convenient as bindings.

So, provided we don’t want to write them ourselves, we have two

options:

• One of the KVO based binding libraries like the RZDataBinding or

the SwiftBond

• The full scale functional reactive programming beasts like

ReactiveCocoa, RxSwift or PromiseKit.

In fact, nowadays, if you hear “MVVM” — you think ReactiveCocoa, and

vice versa. Although it is possible to build the MVVM with the simple
bindings, ReactiveCocoa (or siblings) will allow you to get most of the
MVVM.

There is one bitter truth about reactive frameworks: the great power
comes with the great responsibility. It’s really easy to mess up things
when you go reactive. In other words, if you do something wrong, you
might spend a lot of time debugging the app, so just take a look at this
call stack.

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Reactive Debugging

In our simple example, the FRF framework or even the KVO is an

overkill, instead we’ll explicitly ask the View Model to update using
showGreeting method and use the simple property for greetingDidChange
callback function.

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1 import UIKit
2
3 struct Person { // Model
4 let firstName: String
5 let lastName: String
6 }
7

MVVM example

And again back to our feature assessment:

• Distribution — it is not clear in our tiny example, but, in fact, the

MVVM’s View has more responsibilities than the MVP’s View.
Because the Drst one updates it’s state from the View Model by
setting up bindings, when the second one just forwards all events to
the Presenter and doesn’t update itself.

• Testability — the View Model knows nothing about the View, this

allows us to test it easily. The View might be also tested, but since it
is UIKit dependant you might want to skip it.

• Easy of use — its has the same amount of code as the MVP in our
example, but in the real app where you’d have to forward all events
from the View to the Presenter and to update the View manually,
MVVM would be much skinnier if you used bindings.

The MVVM is very attractive, since it combines beneZts of the

aforementioned approaches, and, in addition, it doesn’t require extra code
for the View updates due to the bindings on the View side. Nevertheless,
testability is still on a good level.

. . .

VIPER

LEGO building experience transferred into the iOS

app design

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VIPER is our last candidate, which is particularly interesting because it

doesn’t come from the MV(X) category.

By now, you must agree that the granularity in responsibilities is very

good. VIPER makes another iteration on the idea of separating
responsibilities, and this time we have Hve layers.

VIPER

• Interactor — contains business logic related to the data (Entities)

or networking, like creating new instances of entities or fetching
them from the server. For those purposes you’ll use some Services
and Managers which are not considered as a part of VIPER module
but rather an external dependency.

• Presenter — contains the UI related (but UIKit independent)

business logic, invokes methods on the Interactor.

• Entities — your plain data objects, not the data access layer, because
that is a responsibility of the Interactor.

• Router — responsible for the segues between the VIPER modules.

Basically, VIPER module can be a one screen or the whole user story of
your application — think of authentication, which can be one screen or
several related ones. How small are your “LEGO” blocks supposed to be? 
— It’s up to you.

If we compare it with the MV(X) kind, we’ll see a few diQerences of the
distribution of responsibilities:

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• Model (data interaction) logic shifted into the Interactor with the
Entities as dumb data structures.

• Only the UI representation duties of the

Controller/Presenter/ViewModel moved into the Presenter, but
not the data altering capabilities.

• VIPER is the Drst pattern which explicitly addresses navigation

responsibility, which is supposed to be resolved by the Router.

Proper way of doing routing is a challenge for the iOS applications, the
MV(X) patterns simply don’t address this issue.

The example doesn’t cover routing or interaction between modules, as

those topics are not covered by the MV(X) patterns at all.

1 import UIKit
2
3 struct Person { // Entity (usually more complex e.g. NSManagedObject)
4 let firstName: String
5 let lastName: String
6 }
7

Yet again, back to the features:

• Distribution — undoubtedly, VIPER is a champion in distribution of

responsibilities.

• Testability —no surprises here, better distribution — better

testability.

• Easy of use — Dnally, two above come in cost of maintainability as

you already guessed. You have to write huge amount of interface
for classes with very small responsibilities.

So what about LEGO?

While using VIPER, you might feel like building The Empire State
Building from LEGO blocks, and that is a signal that you have a problem.
Maybe, it’s too early to adopt VIPER for your application and you should

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consider something simpler. Some people ignore this and continue

shooting out of cannon into sparrows. I assume they believe that their
apps will beneDt from VIPER at least in the future, even if now the
maintenance cost is unreasonably high. If you believe the same, then I’d
recommend you to try Generamba — a tool for generating VIPER
skeletons. Although for me personally it feels like using an automated
targeting system for cannon instead of simply taking a sling shot.

Conclusion
We went though several architectural patterns, and I hope you have
found some answers to what bothered you, but I have no doubt that you
realised that there is no silver bullet so choosing architecture pattern is
a matter of weighting tradeoQs in your particular situation.

Therefore, it is natural to have a mix of architectures in same app. For

example: you’ve started with MVC, then you realised that one particular
screen became too hard to maintain edciently with the MVC and
switched to the MVVM, but only for this particular screen. There is no
need to refactor other screens for which the MVC actually does work
Dne, because both of architectures are easily compatible.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not

simpler — Albert Einstein

Thank you for reading! If you liked this article, please

clap so other people can read it too :)
Follow me on Twitter for more iOS design and patterns.

. . .

How to get a Team Lead job

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