LiveView does two things in particular:

1. It includes live navigation, which updates the URL as you interact with the app. For example, if you try the live scaffold generator in Phoenix v1.5.0-rc.0, you will see that once you click the "New Post" modal, the URL changes to "/posts/new". So if users reconnect by any reason (poor connection, new deployment, etc), they will go back to the same page with the same modal.

2. For forms, we automatically submit the current form state on reconnections, allowing the server and client to sync up.

For complex applications, think a chat app or a game, then you have to persist messages, the game state, and what not on the server. But that would be necessary regardless if you are using LiveView or not.