Kotlin for Mobile Development
Article Summary
Martynas Jurkus from Vinted reveals how his team bet on Kotlin two years before Google officially backed it. The result? A complete transformation of their Android development workflow.
Vinted adopted Kotlin in production in September 2015, long before Google announced first-class support at I/O '17. What started as a skeptical experiment with extension functions evolved into a full-scale migration, driven by frustrations with Java tooling like Retrolambda and its broken incremental builds.
Key Takeaways
- Vinted converted over 75% of their codebase to Kotlin after starting small
- NPE-related crashes completely disappeared from crash monitoring tools
- Development speed increased dramatically despite early adopter growing pains
- Kotlin's Java interoperability removed risk: no overhead, gradual migration possible
- Team ditched Retrolambda, improving build times and code quality
Early adoption of Kotlin transformed Vinted's Android development with 75%+ codebase conversion, eliminated null pointer crashes, and dramatically increased development speed.
About This Article
Vinted's engineering team worried about adopting Kotlin since it wasn't backed by Google. They had real concerns about production risks and whether it would cause reliability problems in their Android codebase.
The team took a gradual approach by using Kotlin's Java interoperability. They started with extension functions and smaller components, which let them migrate without disrupting the existing codebase or adding overhead.
After removing Retrolambda and automating their build processes, code autocompletion performance improved noticeably. The broken incremental builds and compilation issues that had slowed them down before finally went away.