The Graph Query Language (GraphQL) was created by Facebook around 2012 by engineers Lee Byron, Dan Schafer, and Nick Schrock. It was open-sourced three years later, in 2015.
https://graphql.org/
As described by Byron himself in one of his articles, GraphQL came at a time when Facebook's iOS and Android mobile apps were just thin wrappers (mobile WebView) of Facebook's web application. As the number of users grew, so did the complexity of the mobile WebView and thus it started suffering from poor performance and it constantly crashed.
To overcome this challenge, Facebook started transitioning its apps into natively implemented views (as opposed to just web wrappers). However, this raised the need for a mechanism other than HTML to fetch data. In other words, there...