The same applies to mobile. 80% or so of mobile apps are just listviews with a JSON backend. Why do I have to write a list adapter, syncronization logic, lifecy

The same applies to mobile. 80% or so of mobile apps are just listviews with a JSON backend. Why do I have to write a list adapter, syncronization logic, lifecycle management etc. again for each app? Ideally, you should be able to say "Here is my schema, gimme a listview, keep it up to date. Here is a template for the list item, here one for the details view." Make everything declarative. One crucial point is to then make it easy to tweak everything - often abstractions make simple things easy, but slightly less simple things very hard. Once you want to do something more complicated, like having an animation transition from one view to another, you shouldn't have to abandon the framework, but should be able to drop to native code. And yes, on the web we have Django, Rails, etc.. But I still have a lot of repetitive work to do. Why isn't there something like the Django admin which is more suited to users than administrators (I'm sure there is, but it is not mainstream). Let me define my schema, press a button, and I have an ugly CRUD app. Then add constraints and business rules, and pretty templates one by one. Something like, I don't know, SAP or MS Access - a glorified DB browser which you can customize a lot. Add in a graphical designer so you can let an intern create new forms and tables.