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
Critical Insight
Early adoption of Kotlin transformed Vinted's Android development with 75%+ codebase conversion, eliminated null pointer crashes, and dramatically increased development speed.
