All about Backend Driven mobile UI

Few members of mobile engineering community has delved into Backend Driven UI, shared conference talks, blog posts, articles and talked about BDUI. Most engineers are divided into 2 halves; the few who have done it and the majority who maybe have heard/read about it but not experienced it. Getting to work on BDUI is a worthwhile engineering challenge which I personally consider a luxury, not many projects actually will need BDUI. Thus majority of engineers, who are keen on getting tangible experience are left to either speculate, devour their personal time on hobby project or wait. These series of blog post will focus on bridging the knowledge gap and providing the thinking toolset for reasoning what is BDUI and when does it make sense.

Most of the opinion expressed are mine based on 2 years of Flexible Layout Kit (FLK) development then the recent 2 years of working and leading AppCraft team at Zalando. AppCraft is a successor to FLK. Both framework are employed to deliver dynamic, personlized and ever changing home feed in Zalando iOS/Android app.  Zalando app also uses AppCraft to deploy various landing pages; may it be Beauty Page or Designer Feed or Campaign page or an editorial page for Brand. The framework is used by 10+ million app users daily.

The series of post is philosophical reflection of me and my team's work, lessons we learnt along the way, challenges we faced and some insights we got from experience.

Let's get into details of What is Backend Drvien UI ?