Android UI Development with Jetpack
Article Summary
Neil Davies from Just Eat Takeaway reveals how his team eliminated manual theme updates across multiple Android apps. Their solution? A design token system that cut redesign time by 80%.
Just Eat Takeaway built a unified design system called PIE (Principles for Interfaces and Experiences) that generates Android themes automatically from JSON design tokens. They created AndroidPIE, a Kotlin tool that outputs both XML themes for Views and Kotlin classes for Jetpack Compose from a single source of truth.
Key Takeaways
- Design tokens stored in JSON generate 16 theme files for both View and Compose
- Handlebars templating engine transforms one data set into multiple output formats
- Major app redesign completed by regenerating themes, not manual updates
- Shared UI libraries eliminate duplicate components across consumer, restaurant, and delivery apps
- Future integration with Figma APIs will automate design token creation
Critical Insight
By automating theme generation from design tokens, Just Eat Takeaway achieved consistent UI across platforms while dramatically reducing the time and errors in implementing design changes.
