Building the Pincode Android App with Jetpack Compose
Article Summary
The Pincode Android Team at PhonePe built an entire app with Jetpack Compose while it was still maturing. 2.5 million downloads later, they're sharing what actually worked and what didn't.
PhonePe's Pincode team adopted Jetpack Compose for their Android app in production, making them early adopters of Google's declarative UI toolkit. This detailed retrospective covers their journey from 2020 exploration through shipping a real product, including the mistakes they made and lessons learned along the way.
Key Takeaways
- App reached 2.5M+ Play Store downloads using full Compose UI implementation
- Rookie mistakes: running business logic in Composables, ignoring side effects
- Development speed improved dramatically vs XML with fewer boilerplate requirements
- Performance issues emerged from not understanding skippable Composables and recomposition
- Kotlin version coupling created upgrade friction across dependencies
Critical Insight
Jetpack Compose delivered faster development and easier animations, but required deep understanding of recomposition, side effects, and the Stable/Immutable annotations to avoid performance pitfalls.
