Abstract Solar‐driven interfacial distillation (SDID) is becoming an effective green technology for the treatment and reuse of unconventional water sources in the past few years. However, the established design and detection of SDID systems may involve different problems regarding practical application. Herein, through a series of literature research, this work summarizes the current evaluation parameters of SDID performance and the distilled water quality, highlights the importance of evaporation and distilled water collection rate, emphasizes that volatile organic compounds would become a new pollution feature in evaporation process, and suggests that insoluble salt crystallization and microbial corrosion should be considered during the design phase to ensure the constant use of the solar evaporators.