Server-Driven UI for Mobile and Beyond

QCon London 2024

Session SDUI

Server-Driven UI for Mobile and Beyond

Wednesday Apr 10 / 02:45PM BST, Churchill (Ground Fl.)

Abstract

Server-Driven UI is a broad term that covers many kinds of technologies. In recent years, one application of Server-Driven UI has been to drive full user interfaces on mobile platforms such as iOS and Android, allowing for the updating of these interfaces even after the apps have been submitted and approved by their respective app store gateways.

On the Growth side at Netflix, we have fully embraced this application of Server-Driven UI as a beneficial technology to support our Customer Lifecycle UIs, especially as we generally do not force users to update their mobile apps. In addition to the mobile use case of SDUI, we have extended our use beyond just mobile into our Web and TV platforms as well.

Through our presentation, we hope you can better understand:

  • What problems we were trying to solve with Server-Driven UI
  • How we extend our solution beyond just mobile to our Web and TV platforms
  • What kinds of issues still persist with the new framework
  • Our future outlook as we continue to evolve the framework

Interview

My current focus at work is continuing to architect and build out the mobile client implementations of the SDUI framework we designed here at Netflix. I am also working with many of our partners to evangelize and determine the right fit with which to broaden the scope of our SDUI framework.

The motivation is to share what has been working and hasn't been working regarding SDUI, including how it relates to non-Mobile platforms. I hope that it helps people understand how a new SDUI approach could be beneficial while also allowing them to avoid the issues and mistakes that we've experienced as we've grown the solution to the point where it is today.

The target audience is anyone interested in SDUI who wants to hear how a problem set would be experienced at scale to warrant an exploration of SDUI, and the kinds of challenges and problems that are experienced at the size of Netflix's scale.

I want them to walk away with an understanding of one approach to SDUI and a better feeling of how to navigate the kinds of issues that Netflix has faced, in addition to taking away a good idea of how that approach worked to the benefit of impacting hundreds of millions of users. They should walk away with a better grasp of SDUI and its pros and cons.

Topics

SDUI architecture multi-platform mobile
76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon London 2024 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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