GraphQL Schema Design

A mobile order screen needs four calls: the order, the customer, the shipment, and the product summaries. The web application needs all of that plus the latest support conversation. A tablet application needs the order and the shipment, but not the customer profile.

The problem is not that REST cannot return the data. It is that several first-party clients repeatedly need different connected shapes, and the fixed operations have started copying individual screens.

GraphQL offers a different contract: publish one typed graph, and let each caller select the supported fields it needs