[brad0]

I use a similar system when building mobile app features.

Sometimes (almost always) an app feature is developed parallel to the API service.

It's useful to return a mock response so you can build the entire feature including networking. This way you don't need to wait for the server side component to finish.

A temp server takes time to set up and maintain. It's like any tool. Why use Dropbox if you can just save your file to a usb drive and carry it around everywhere?

[endeepak]

Yup. We are building a product with micro services architecture, more often we finalise the API contract with other service teams and develop our service against stubbed response till the other teams complete their development