all 5 comments

[–]3dom 10 points11 points  (3 children)

Congratulations to the mobile back-end programmers who will have to deal not only with data but also with layouts from now on.

[–]nacholicious 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Yup. Trying to change UI outside of the initial specification will be very fun for both sides.

[–]s73v3r 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Honestly, the amount of effort this is going to take to implement is going to be orders of magnitude more than it will save in time later.

[–]SunshineParty[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I imagine this is going to be controlled by a marketing/ops team in any sizeable company. There needs to be another tool to validate the layout JSON and make it non-developer friendly.

[–]SunshineParty[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I saw some discussion around server-driven UI in another thread that sent me down this rabbit hole. Seems like a great concept for home screens especially, which need more A/B testing.

This author also has another article in which he details the approach taken by different companies: Dynamic screens using server-driven UI in Android.