If we think about the way we ship applications today, there are a lot of inefficiencies - we have to wait for the various release cycles and cadences of Android and iOS, respectively, have to work to ensure feature parity, and have to wait for adoption afterward.
When we talk about how we build these features, engineers really fetch data from endpoints and bind that data to UIs that they build locally and natively in the mobile applications. This lets us change the data at any point after the application is already in production, but not really the ui.
What if, instead of data coming from an endpoint, our UI representations come from that endpoint instead? Instead of binding the fetched data to the ui on the client side, why not fetch pre-bound ui representation from the server side? That’s what we refer to as server driven ui.
My colleague Ahmed El Helw and I recently gave a talk at Droidcon NYC 2023 about this topic and how we can leveraged a Design System to build a Server Driven UI Framework for mobile applications.