LiveView Native at first glance

Recently I had a small chat with bcardarella on X about LiveView and decided to put it into separate article. In my everyday work I use Elixir/Phoenix and Flutter. I even created cross platform music player fully powered by flutter, so LVN was really interesting for me to try.

Generally server driven UI is a paradigm when your UI being created on server and sent to mobile. This is common approach for web apps with SSR but not so common for mobile apps. Its not common for mobile apps because in most cases you want your app to be able to run app with slow connection or even without it — so your UI renders and then/meanwhile it loads data from your server. However there are apps which fully powered by server. As a good example — Home Assistant companion app when the app itself is just a shelf which later renders UI. Usually it powered by rendering webview and then webview renders the UI. This is working approach but it totally misses native feel of UI. All of us worked with native apps and you immediately see when its just a webview.

Such paradigm often used for apps when you need to change UI per each user or just deploy changes very often, so it would make little sense to wait for app reviews on appstore/google play.

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