The evolution of native engineering at Tripadvisor: Part 2

Tripadvisor's mobile team was drowning in nearly-identical UI components. Their server-driven UI framework promised speed but delivered the opposite.

Mason Pomeroy, from Tripadvisor's native engineering team, details their journey rebuilding their SDUI framework from rigid, pre-built 'Sections' into a flexible component system. This is part 2 of a 3-part series on their native app architecture evolution.

Key Takeaways

• Old system required constant new Section types for minor UI changes
• New framework uses composable rows and columns like native layout systems
• Solved GraphQL recursion limits with clever container flattening logic
• 33% increase in throughput on UI focused projects after one year
• Annotation based versioning ensures backward compatibility across client versions

Part 3 reveals the iOS-specific implementation challenges with The Composable Architecture that made this system actually work in production.