android-dev

Android / KMP baseline

House defaults — apply them without reminders or re-derivation; where the project's actual conventions differ, follow the project:

• DI: Hilt + KSP (or android-skills:koin when the project uses Koin). Async: Coroutines/Flow — no LiveData in new code. JSON: kotlinx.serialization. Images: Coil.
• Network/local: Android uses Retrofit/OkHttp + Room; KMP shared uses Ktor + Room or SQLDelight. Retrofit is Android-only — never in a shared module.
• Modules: feature-vertical packages and modules; :core:model has zero Android deps; :feature:* modules never depend on each other.
• Errors: mapped to a domain type at the repository boundary — platform exceptions never leak past it; UI state explicitly models loading / success / error (see android-skills:android-data-layer).

Skill routing

Load the specific skill for the task, always with the fully-qualified `android-skills:` prefix — never the short name (compose, koin, …).

New-project UI convention (greenfield)

For a new project or feature with no established convention. In existing code, match what's already there — see Reuse the project's existing mechanism below.

The UI layer is MVVM with an MVI-style state/effect split:

• One immutable `UiState` per screen, exposed as StateFlow<UiState> and structured with the four buckets below. The content composable renders it and emits callbacks — nothing else.
• One effects stream for fire-once imperatives — navigate, snackbar/toast, scroll-to, share-sheet, haptics. Use Channel(Channel.BUFFERED).receiveAsFlow(), not SharedFlow: an effect emitted while the screen is backgrounded buffers and replays on resume instead of being dropped. Collect it in a LaunchedEffect (lifecycle-scoped via repeatOnLifecycle), never collectAsStateWithLifecycle. Channel-vs-SharedFlow rationale: android-skills:kotlin-flows.
• State vs effect — "does it survive a config change?" Anything still true after rotation / process death is state (an error to show = a field in UiState); anything the UI runs once and forgets is an effect. This is the durable-state-over-events rule in compose/references/state-management.md: keep durable things in state; the effect stream is only for one-shot imperatives.
• Promote callbacks to a `@Stable Actions` interface at ~4–5+ (or when the same set is threaded through several composable layers). Below that, individual lambdas are simpler — don't abstract early. The ViewModel implements the interface; the content composable depends on FooActions, never the ViewModel, so it stays pure and previewable (a no-op object : FooActions {} in previews).

data class FooUiState(/* the four buckets — see below */)

sealed interface FooEffect {
    data class NavigateTo(val id: String) : FooEffect
    data class ShowSnackbar(val message: String) : FooEffect
}

@Stable                                       // promote here once lambdas pile up (~4-5+)
interface FooActions {
    fun onItemClick(id: String)
    fun onRefresh()
}

class FooViewModel(/* … */) : ViewModel(), FooActions {
    private val _uiState = MutableStateFlow(FooUiState())
    val uiState: StateFlow<FooUiState> = _uiState.asStateFlow()

    private val _effects = Channel<FooEffect>(Channel.BUFFERED)   // not SharedFlow — buffers while backgrounded
    val effects = _effects.receiveAsFlow()

    override fun onItemClick(id: String) { /* _uiState.update { … } */ _effects.trySend(FooEffect.NavigateTo(id)) }
    override fun onRefresh() { /* … */ }
}

@Composable
fun FooScreen(viewModel: FooViewModel = hiltViewModel(), onNavigate: (String) -> Unit) {
    val uiState by viewModel.uiState.collectAsStateWithLifecycle()
    val lifecycle = LocalLifecycleOwner.current.lifecycle
    LaunchedEffect(Unit) {
        lifecycle.repeatOnLifecycle(Lifecycle.State.STARTED) {
            viewModel.effects.collect { effect ->
                when (effect) {
                    is FooEffect.NavigateTo -> onNavigate(effect.id)
                    is FooEffect.ShowSnackbar -> { /* show snackbar */ }
                }
            }
        }
    }
    FooContent(uiState = uiState, actions = viewModel)   // VM passed as FooActions — FooContent sees only the interface
}

Kotlin 2.4+: collapse the _uiState/uiState pair with explicit backing fields (val uiState: StateFlow<FooUiState> + field = MutableStateFlow(…)) — uiState only, never the effects Channel. Full idiom + version gate: android-skills:kotlin-flows.

Four-bucket state modeling

Screens with rich interactions (forms, calculators, multi-step wizards) get unmanageable when state is one flat data class. Slice UiState into four explicit buckets, and derive computed values as class properties, not constructor parameters:

data class CheckoutUiState(
    // 1. Editable input — what the user types
    val email: String = "",
    val cardNumber: String = "",
    // 3. Persisted snapshot — last value read from the repository / stored cross-screen
    val savedShippingAddress: Address? = null,
    // 4. Transient UI-only — flags that must NOT survive the screen
    val isSubmitting: Boolean = false,
    val showCardScannerOverlay: Boolean = false,
) {
    // 2. Derived — getters, NOT constructor params, so no caller can copy() into an
    //    inconsistent state (e.g. emailValid = false next to a valid email).
    val emailValid: Boolean get() = email.isValidEmail()
    val canSubmit: Boolean get() = emailValid && cardNumber.passesLuhn() && !isSubmitting
}

The bucket dictates lifecycle and persistence, not the field. Persisting isSubmitting keeps the spinner forever after process death; computing canSubmit outside the class lets it drift from the inputs; persisting cardNumber cross-screen leaks PII. Mixing the buckets produces bugs that look architectural.

UI state and UI models live in different files

UiState is the screen's contract with its ViewModel, not a UI model — it gets its own file (or the ViewModel's, if that's the project's layout). Never sweep UI models into it. "Each type has a single owner / it's one unit of change / the real seam is role-per-file" argues for exactly this mistake: the state and the models it holds are different roles.

Group the models by composition, never by screen:

• Models composing one bigger model share that model's file, named after the bigger model — ChallengeDetailUi.kt holds ChallengeDetailUi plus the ChallengeTaskUi / SponsorshipUi it is built from.
• Independent models each get their own file.
• FooModels.kt / FooUiModels.kt is never the answer — reaching for a grab-bag name proves no aggregate root was found, which means the types are independent and belong in their own files.

Kotlin's "related declarations may share a file named after the primary declaration" is the mechanism, not a licence to nominate the state as that primary declaration and sweep the models in behind it.

Reuse the project's existing mechanism

Before adding any new mechanism — an event dispatcher, an effects Channel/SharedFlow, a use-case layer, or a parallel state field — open a sibling ViewModel in the same feature and reuse what's already there. The easy miss here is duplicating an existing mechanism instead of widening it — adding a second shouldDisplayUndoX flag beside the existing one rather than generalizing the one that's there. If existing code contradicts a "best practice," follow the code and flag the inconsistency; never silently override the project's architecture.

Comments — earn every one

The test for every comment: could a reader quickly infer what it says from the code beside it? If yes, it's redundant — delete it. A comment survives only by carrying what the code cannot: a non-obvious why — a decision, constraint, workaround, or gotcha. Never narrate what the code does; clear names and small functions already say it. "What a well-known type or call does" is a what the reader can look up, not a why.

Write the fewest comments that pass that test — this holds even when a task says "make it readable" or "for juniors." Readability comes from naming and structure; a comment a newcomer needs in order to follow what the code does is a signal to rename or extract, not to annotate.

Keep a genuine why (// rethrow first — a broad catch would swallow CancellationException), a justifying comment at a surprising call site, KDoc on a public API that adds information beyond its signature, and TODO(owner-or-link). Honor an explicit request for documentation.

Delete on sight — each is trivially inferable from the code beside it:

// ---- domain model ----                                 // section-divider / banner (any width)
/** The user profile as the app cares about it. */        // KDoc restating the class name
val uiState = _uiState.asStateFlow()  // private mutable, public read-only   (restates the idiom)
} catch (e: IOException) {  // no connectivity, timeout, DNS failure   (restates what the type means)

KMP

Inject a CoroutineDispatcher everywhere rather than calling Dispatchers.Main / Dispatchers.IO directly: Dispatchers.Main isn't guaranteed on every KMP target without the -ktx artifacts, and injection is also what makes dispatcher-swapped tests possible. Use expect/actual for platform specifics (file I/O, push tokens, biometrics); on iOS prefer immutable shared state.