I joined a project a couple years back, where there was a different backend for android and iOS, but both used the same database. To do anything, youād need to make several calls (fooAndroid, fooAndroid2, fooAndroid3, etc.) and the server used the phone as a sort of ātemporary memoryā, since it would send back unrelated variables in the response, and the next call would need those variables as parameters. Iād imagine it started with someone not wanting to set up caching in their āstatelessā XML API because there was a release and āIāll fix it laterā.