Rebranding on Android Apps: Behind the Scenes
Article Summary
Hannah Olukoye from mobile.de reveals how her team pulled off a complete Android rebrand in just 2 weeks—but only after tackling 8 years of technical debt first.
The mobile.de Android team recently completed a major rebranding that included implementing dark mode and overhauling their entire design system. This interview with their Android architect breaks down the architectural decisions, refactoring strategies, and hard-won lessons from transforming a legacy codebase.
Key Takeaways
- Dissolved legacy components and migrated to Material Components for consistency
- Established token-based theming to support dark mode and eliminate hardcoded values
- Consolidated 8 years of redundant styles before implementing the rebrand
- Aligned naming conventions with Design System to simplify Figma-to-Android translation
- Would choose Jetpack Compose if starting from scratch today
The actual rebrand took only 2 weeks once the team spent months refactoring their theming architecture and eliminating technical debt.
About This Article
The mobile.de Android team struggled with inconsistent styling across components. They had too many redundant styles and relied on legacy custom UI elements, which made dark mode implementation impossible and created ongoing maintenance headaches.
Hannah Olukoye's team switched to Material Components and set up clear naming schemes that matched Design System conventions. They moved away from hardcoded values and used token-based definitions tied to system settings instead.
The team consolidated icon assets and cut down on style definitions by using consistent tinting and base component definitions. This reduced custom implementations and made dark mode work across all components without extra effort.