Mobile clients care about payload size, stable pagination, and offline-tolerant reads. Web apps often want richer filtering. One API can serve both if you design contracts around resources, not screens.

Between 2025 and 2026, regulators and enterprise buyers increasingly expect explicit data minimization on mobile payloads and audit-friendly access logs—design list endpoints and exports with those reviews in mind, not as a retrofit.

Contract basics

  • Consistent error envelope with machine-readable codes plus human messages.
  • Cursor or keyset pagination for large lists—avoid exploding offset queries.
  • Optional sparse fieldsets or projections when mobile needs thin objects.

Document breaking vs additive changes; use versioning or sunset headers before mobile store review cycles get blocked by surprise schema shifts.