Opinions on AWS Mobile Hub/Amplify

Hey, I’ve been developing an application using Serverless, everything has been going swimmingly so far. I’m coming to the point where I’m going to develop a mobile client (using react-native) to interact with my backend services and I’ve just stumbled across AWS Mobile Hub/Amplify.

What is the general opinion, if any, on Mobile Hub? It appears to have some overlap as it’s also concerned with provisioning. The sales pitch sounds pretty good; taking care of user pools, analytics etc. using best practices.

I know AWS Amplify is meant to work without Mobile Hub, but the documentation on doing so looks sparse is centered around it’s use.

Amplify is a very new product. While it’s improving at a rapid pace it’s not very mature. In particular it’s very centered around mobile hub and use cases that it supports. Mobile hub itself is an attempt to simplify the development process which makes a lot of assumptions for you and doesn’t always set things up the way you want.

I’m currently using Amplify but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you can live entirely inside the it’s current use cases or you’re willing to get your hands dirty (you need to be willing to look at the Amplify code and occasionally write PR’s). I don’t make much use of Mobile Hub. Generally I try to provision services using the resource section in serverless so it’s a repeatable deployment process.

Thanks for the reply buggy.

Yes I’ve decided against using the mobile hub as I’ve already built a substantial part of this project using both serverless and cloudformation for provisioning (cloudformation for separate EC2 stacks).

I am intending to use Amplify however, by configuring it manually opposed to leveraging it’s integration with Mobile Hub. My reasoning behind this choice was that Amazon appear to be linking to Amplify in all of their docs/examples as the preferred method for interacting with AWS services. No doubt I’ll have to roll up my sleeves along the way like you’ve mentioned, but that’s to be expected I suppose!