A few months ago I started consulting on an umbrella project (about 10 apps). The first thing I did was deumbrellization of the project, which brought some benefits:
- about 2k LOC less, due to removal of the repetitive boilerplate across subprojects
- faster test and build times
- simplified folder structure
- better tooling support for simple projects
As an example of the last point, various paths that are printed by mix tasks (e.g. test IIRC) aren’t “clickable” in vscode (I couldn’t click to open the file in the editor), because the printed paths are missing the apps/myapp/ prefix. I found this extremely annoying and disruptive. This alone is for me the reason to avoid umbrella as much as possible.
Generally, my sentiment is that if the subapps are not deployed separately, the umbrella app doesn’t bring anything useful to the table, compared to single project + boundary. Even if boundary is not used, I find the benefits of umbrella don’t justify the issues mentioned above.
