Android Development with GraphQL

Efe Karasabun from Thumbtack reveals how GraphQL solved their biggest mobile API headaches. No more over-fetching data or coordinating breaking changes across teams.

Thumbtack's Android team adopted GraphQL with Apollo client to improve developer experience and app performance. This article walks through their practical implementation workflow, from schema design to auto-generated code, showing how GraphQL's strongly-typed schema catches bugs at compile-time instead of production.

Key Takeaways

• GraphQL eliminates over-fetching: clients request only the data they need
• Strongly-typed schema catches breaking changes at compile-time, not in production
• Apollo auto-generates Java classes from queries, removing manual model writing
• GraphiQL mocking lets Android devs build UI before server implementation exists
• No API versioning needed: deprecated fields maintain backward compatibility

The article includes a specific workflow diagram showing how Thumbtack coordinates schema changes between backend and Android repos to avoid blocking other engineers.