Find the right AI use cases before investing in development.
Connect AI to your existing systems and workflows.
Build autonomous AI agents that automate complex tasks.
Design and develop AI solutions tailored to your business.
Build secure, scalable AI systems for enterprise environments.
Legacy software modernization →
Upgrade outdated systems for better performance, security, and scalability.
Make informed technology decisions before investing in development.
Validate your product idea with user and business insights.
Define the right scope to launch faster and reduce risk.
Confirm your idea is technically viable before you build.
Capabilities
Want to start a software project with us?
Book a time with our technology experts →
We brought young developers together to explore the future of AI agents. More editions are coming soon.
DE*updated October 2026
Open ten mobile apps and you’ll spot the same handful of building blocks in nearly every one: a button, a text field, a menu, a card.
That’s not a lack of imagination. It’s the result of years of testing what helps someone tap, type, and find what they need without stopping to think about it.
Get these elements wrong and people bounce before they see what your product does. Get them right and the interface disappears, leaving only the task at hand.
We’ve built mobile products for clients ranging from early-stage startups to global enterprises, and the pattern holds every time.
The apps that feel effortless are built from a well-understood set of components, chosen on purpose rather than copied from whatever the last app happened to do.
This guide walks through 22 of those components: what each one is for, when to use it, and where teams tend to get it wrong.
Key takeaways
Input controls are what users physically touch, so if these are wrong, nothing else in the app matters much.
They let people enter information or direct what the app does next. Without them, an app is just a static screen.
Buttons perform an action the moment someone taps them, whether that’s submitting a form or closing a window. They’re typically rectangular with rounded corners, paired with a short, specific label so the action is obvious before the tap.
Forget the old advice about using bright red or yellow to grab attention.
Color choice should come from your product’s own color system, applied consistently, not a generic rule that also happens to be a poor pairing for colorblind users.
What matters is contrast ratio, not the specific hue, and every button needs to pass it against its background.
Tap targets matter as much as color.
WCAG’s target size guideline calls for a minimum of 24 by 24 CSS pixels, and we design closer to 44 by 44 whenever the layout allows it, because a button that’s technically compliant can still be miserable to hit on a real thumb.
Responsive buttons that shift on tap or hold reinforce that the app registered the input, which matters more on mobile than people assume.
A floating action button, or FAB, is a circular button that floats above the content, usually in a bottom corner, and represents the single most important action on that screen.
Material Design 3 treats it as a distinct pattern from a standard button precisely because it’s meant to be used sparingly.
We only recommend a FAB when a screen has one dominant action, like composing a new message or adding an item to a list.
Add a second one and you’ve undone the entire point, which was to make the primary action unmissable.
Text fields are where people type, most often inside a form.
Clear state indicators, a red border for an invalid entry, a grayed-out border for a disabled field, save people from guessing what went wrong.
Field length should match expected input, since a tiny box for a long address just invites frustration.
One habit worth dropping: relying on placeholder text as the only label.
Once someone starts typing, the placeholder disappears, and anyone using a screen reader may never have heard it in the first place.
Keep a persistent, visible label above or beside the field, built as a proper reusable component in whatever design tool your team uses.
A search bar lets someone skip your navigation entirely and jump straight to what they want, which is exactly why so many apps now put one at the top of the home screen instead of burying it in a menu.
Pairing it with filter chips, price range, category, date, turns a long results list into something people can narrow down in a few taps.
We treat search as a first-class navigation path now, not a fallback for when the menu structure fails.
If your content library is large enough that users scroll past more than a screen or two of options, a search bar with filters usually earns its space more than another layer of tabs would.
Dropdown lists show a list of options on tap and let someone choose one, with the selection becoming the new default display.
They work best for long or changeable lists, employee rosters are a good example, since the list itself doesn’t need to be redesigned every time it changes.
A responsive border color on tap gives useful feedback that the field is active.
Radio buttons let someone pick exactly one option from a visible set, with invalid choices grayed out.
They suit short, fixed lists that rarely change, weekdays, months, subscription tiers, and show up often in settings screens.
Material Design 3’s current guidance reflects updated selection-control patterns and dynamic color support, which is worth knowing if your design system still references the older Material 2 specs.
Checkboxes look like radio buttons but allow multiple selections from a fixed list, which makes them the right choice whenever a question has more than one valid answer, a health app asking someone to flag every symptom that applies, for instance.
Material 3’s checkbox guidelines are the current reference rather than the legacy Material 2 docs many older tutorials still point to.
Each checkbox needs its own accessible label, not just a shared caption above the group, or screen reader users lose track of which box does what.
Toggles are on/off switches, common in settings screens and used for anything with exactly two states.
Make the on-state visually distinct from the off-state through color, not just position, and check that both states clear a proper contrast ratio.
A gray-on-gray toggle might look clean, but if a user with low vision can’t tell which state it’s in, it’s not doing its job.
Before moving past input controls, it’s worth treating accessibility as a checklist rather than an afterthought:
None of this is optional polish.
We’ve seen apps ship with buttons that pass a design review but fail the first accessibility audit, and retrofitting contrast and labeling after launch costs far more engineering time than building it in from the start.
Navigation is what lets someone move through an app without getting lost, and the best schemes are the ones users never have to think about.
Gesture-based navigation, swiping back, pulling to refresh, has become a real supplement to tapped menus on both major platforms, and we now design with the assumption that at least some of your users will reach for a gesture before they reach for a menu icon.
The three-line hamburger icon is universally recognized at this point, and tapping it reveals a hidden menu.
That familiarity is the whole benefit: it hides a long list of options without cluttering the screen, and users already know what it does before they tap it.
Sidebars are menus that slide in from the screen edge on a tap or swipe.
Their main advantage is space. They keep a minimalist main screen while still giving deeper navigation somewhere to live.
Tab bars sit along the bottom of the screen, common in iOS apps, with each icon representing a major section.
Bottom placement isn’t accidental, it puts navigation within comfortable thumb reach for one-handed use, which matters more than most redesigns give it credit for.
Carousels let people swipe horizontally through a set of items, usually images, with dots below showing position.
They save time compared to tapping through screens one by one and work well for comparing several items or photos side by side.
Informational components tell users something without asking them to do anything first, whether that’s a status update, a warning, or a quick hint about how a feature works.
Push notifications reach people outside the app itself, on their lock screen or notification tray, and they’re one of the more effective retention tools available, when they’re used with restraint.
Overuse can backfire really quickly, though.
Android opt-in rates fell from 85% to 67% in a single year following changes to Android’s permission model, with iOS sitting lower still at 56%, for a blended average around 61%.
That drop is a signal that users are getting more selective about what they let through, not less.
Frequency matters just as much as relevance.
Send too many and users disable notifications outright rather than tolerate the noise, which is a worse outcome than never having them opt in at all.
How and when you ask for permission, ideally with context about the value first rather than a cold system prompt on first launch, has a direct effect on whether people opt in to begin with.
Push notifications are also a different tool from in-app messaging.
If the message only matters while someone is already using the app, that’s a job for a snackbar or toast, not a push notification competing for lock-screen attention.
Progress bars show how far along a multi-step process is, from a simple percentage to a detailed breakdown by step.
Breaking a long task into visible chunks makes it feel more manageable, and there’s a real psychological payoff each time a step completes.
Tooltips are short, contextual hints that explain a specific feature, either shown automatically the first time someone sees a screen or triggered by tapping a help icon.
They’re a core part of progressive onboarding, letting people learn an app by using it instead of reading a manual first.
Loaders signal that something is happening in the background and ask for a moment of patience.
A spinner is the most common pattern, often starting gray and gaining color as the task progresses. Where space allows, a loading bar works just as well.
Skeleton screens, gray content-shaped placeholders that fill in as real data arrives, have become the preferred pattern for content-heavy screens because they set expectations about layout before anything even loads.
Whichever pattern you choose, the goal is the same: reassure users the app is working, not frozen.
This is a newer functional group, and one that’s largely absent from older component lists, but it’s become essential.
These are the transient elements that sit on top of the current screen, deliver a message or a choice, and then get out of the way.
A snackbar or toast is a small message that appears briefly at the bottom of the screen, confirms something just happened (“Message sent,” “Item removed”), and disappears on its own.
Unlike a push notification, it only fires while someone is actively in the app, which makes it the right tool for low-stakes, in-the-moment feedback that doesn’t need a permanent record.
We lean on snackbars specifically because they don’t interrupt: a modal stops the user cold, but a snackbar confirms and moves on. Save the interruption for choices that need one.
Modals and dialogs sit above the current screen and demand a decision before the user can continue, confirming a deletion or agreeing to terms, for example.
Action sheets are a mobile-specific variant, sliding up from the bottom with a short list of choices tied to whatever the user just tapped.
Use these sparingly.
Every modal is a moment where you’re telling the user to stop what they were doing, and stacking multiple dialogs in a row is one of the fastest ways to make an app feel like it’s fighting the user rather than helping them.
A bottom sheet is a panel that slides up from the bottom edge, showing more detail or more options without leaving the current screen.
It can be dismissed with a swipe down or a tap outside it, and it’s become the default pattern for anything that used to require a full-screen takeover, like a share menu or a set of secondary settings.
We reach for a bottom sheet whenever we want to add depth to a screen without leaving it. It keeps context intact in a way a full new screen doesn’t.
Container components group related information together, which keeps the interface from feeling cluttered and lets you hide detail until someone wants it.
Accordions are collapsible, expandable sections that let users show or hide content on tap.
They turn a long list into manageable chunks, which matters a lot on a small screen. An ecommerce app might organize categories this way, so people only expand the ones they care about.
Cards group related information the way a physical business card does, usually with a summary and a button or link to see more.
They’ve become one of the most flexible components available, doing double duty as both content containers and navigation entry points, which is why they show up in nearly every modern app’s home screen.
Forms collect related data, contact details, an order, a signup, and are built from individual input components plus a submission button.
The biggest risk with forms is length. A form that feels endless gets abandoned halfway through.
Splitting a long form across multiple screens, three or four fields per screen, keeps each step feeling quick and reduces the chance someone gives up before finishing.
If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably not looking for a component glossary so much as a team that can turn these decisions into a shipped product.
That’s a fair thing to want, because the gap between “we know what a bottom sheet is” and “we designed and built one that holds up under real usage” is where most projects lose time.
We design and build mobile apps end to end, from the first prototype through production code, for clients ranging from early-stage startups to companies like Royal Caribbean, where we built a crew-facing app used by 70,000 people across 40 ships, offline-first, in React Native.
That kind of scale forces you to get the fundamentals right: components that stay accessible, consistent, and fast, no matter how large the user base gets.
Our teams work as an extension of yours, with designers and engineers in the same room from day one, so nothing gets lost in the handoff between a Figma file and working code.
If you’re planning a new app or rebuilding one that’s starting to feel dated, we’d be glad to talk through what that could look like.
Petar leads Shake (DECODE’s sister company) as CEO, delivering the product to a growing number of happy, innovative clients. Day-to-day, he ensures the engineering, design, product, marketing and sales teams all work in harmony. Before moving to Shake, Petar led DECODE. Although an engineer by schooling, his natural talent soon saw him making an impact on the marketing, sales and branding side of things. Petar’s passions include architecture, skiing, sailing, and a good glass of red wine.
In this article, we'll reveal seven thrilling mobile app design trends we feel you should know about.
There's no easy way to achieve great UX design. This article will discuss mobile app design best practices to help you create a successful app.
This article will help you understand the importance of UX. It starts with the five fundamental mobile app design principles and then goes into a practical guide for implementing them.
