I've worked on plenty of small to mid-size apps and that's not how we ever do it. Like I said, we build views and API requests. That's just the same MVC framework for the past decade or so. And I've done the same for streaming services albeit not at the scale of Netflix. Given how apps like Netflix and YouTube are so nicely synced between mobile, web and STBs I'd still imagine all the logic and persistence is server-side. I can only speak from my experience though, I'd love to understand how you've done it and when you need to embed a lot of non-UI code in a client.