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Mobile App Development vocabulary · Screens, UI Components and Gestures

UI

Meaning in mobile app development, with examples

/ˌjuː ˈaɪ/abbreviationCore term

In mobile app development, UI means: User interface: everything on the screen that people see and touch to use an app, such as buttons, text fields, lists and menus.

In Turkish: kullanıcı arayüzü, arayüz

How it is used

Very common in compounds: UI design, UI component, UI test, UI thread. Often paired with UX (user experience): UI is how the app looks and is laid out, UX is how it feels to use. Mobile UI is built with UIKit, SwiftUI, Android Views or Jetpack Compose.

Example sentences

  1. The new UI looks great, but the buttons are too small for older users.

  2. Never block the UI while the app is downloading data.

Common collocations

  • UI design
  • UI component
  • update the UI
  • block the UI
  • screenOne full view of an app that the user sees at a time, such as the login screen or the settings screen; apps are planned as a set of screens.
  • UI testAn automated test that uses the app the way a person would, tapping buttons, typing text and checking what appears on the screen.
  • main threadThe thread on which an app draws its interface and handles user input; if slow work runs there, the app freezes and stops responding.
  • SwiftUIApple's declarative framework, introduced in 2019, for building user interfaces in Swift by describing what the screen should show for each state.
  • Jetpack ComposeGoogle's modern declarative toolkit for building Android user interfaces in Kotlin, using composable functions instead of XML layouts.

More terms: Screens, UI Components and Gestures

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