DivKit

2025: Adding a Visual Editor

Yandex on May 21, 2025 presented a major update to its DivKit framework, which is available to users in the public domain. It has a visual editor with which you can develop interfaces without writing code - from ready-made elements, as in the designer. Tools for working with forms and animations have also become available to users. All this allows you to quickly prototype and create application interfaces - including those who do not know how to program.

DivKit has helped create more than 330 applications. Yandex itself also uses the framework to develop key interface elements, such as the main screen of the mobile Browser, as well as promotions, widgets and stories in the mobile Browser, Masterpiece, Travel, Yandex and Alice applications.

Yandex develops DivKit taking into account feedback from users and has added functions that they themselves have offered to the updated framework - for example, tools that simplify working with forms and animations. The framework also has support for local variables and user functions - this helps to quickly create interfaces, avoid repetitions and simplify code.

2022: Source Disclosure

Yandex has released an open source tool to speed up the development of DivKit mobile applications, which also allows you to update software interfaces faster. The Russian company announced this on August 26, 2022.

According to Yandex, DivKit can be used as part of the server driven UI approach, when the application interface is managed from the server. This allows you to change the interface on the fly, without updating applications. The developer simply describes the elements in a special format on the server, and the framework turns this description into elements of the application - and for several platforms at once. The developer does not need to write code for each of them. DivKit supports three main platforms: Android, iOS and the web. With it, you can change the appearance of components or add something new: for example, a gallery or a likes counter.

Yandex has released an open tool to speed up the development of mobile applications

According to the developers, the framework is convenient both for creating new products and for developing existing ones. It contains libraries for developing the server part on Kotlin, TypeScript and Python. Interfaces on DivKit are smooth and fast. In addition, the framework is easy to use - you can get acquainted with it in just an hour or two, Yandex said.

It took us five years to develop this framework. It originated in the Yandex application team, and is now involved in many services. The entire interface of the main screen of the Yandex application is built on it, it is used in Edadil, Yandex.Market, Alice, Yandex TV and other services. Now everyone can use and develop this tool, "said Ilya Bogin, head of the mobile development department, quoted by the Yandex press service.

The source code of DivKit is published on the GitHub site under the open source Apache 2.0 license.^[1]

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