Update 2023-03-29: In August 2021 Apple acquired Primephonic the company. On March 28, 2023 Apple launched Apple Music Classical as a new app. This new app is built on the foundations of the Primephonic app, the fundamentals of the Server Driven UI architecture as described in this post remain the same.
Note: This post is based on a talk I gave at CocoaHeadsNL in July 2020. Warning: because this is based on a transcription of a talk, sentences and wording may be weird or incoherent. The original talk, including a live Q&A afterwards, can be seen here:
Over the years, I’ve build many different types of apps. However in one aspect they’ve all been very similar; In the client/server architecture, the server sends domain objects to the client (encoded in JSON), and the client renders these domain objects to some pretty UI.
Server Driven UI is different. The server does not send domain objects, with the client having to decide how to render those. Instead, the server decides what and how to render, and just sends instructions to the client. You know, kinda like HTML…
(Honestly, it’s not HTML… But it sort of is. But really, it isn’t)
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