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Choosing the wrong date-time API can seriously snarl up your Kotlin app. Timezone mismatches, formatting bugs, inconsistent timestamps – all of them can seriously drain your time and they’re hard to trace without the right tooling. Kotlin gives you multiple date-time tools – LocalDate, Instant, DateTimeFormatter, and kotlinx-datetime – but each is designed for a specific use case across Android, server-side, and multiplatform projects.

Kotlin annotations allow compilers or libraries to understand our code. These metadata tags don’t directly change code logic, but they help modify how it is interpreted, optimized, or validated. This simplifies Android development by automating repetitive tasks and ensuring consistent code behavior. It also improves code readability, reduces boilerplate code, and introduces automated checks and generation.

Sealed classes are a special kind of class in Kotlin, used to create restricted hierachies — where the full list of sub-classes is strictly limited, and known in advance. This is particularly useful when we want to enhance the power of Kotlin’s when statement, model a type that has a fixed set of possible variations, or represent a fixed group of states or outcomes (such as network responses, UI states and form validations).

Before we get started on WebSocket integration, it’s worth quickly explaining how building real-time mobile apps used to work – and why issues with lag and latency led engineers to turn to WebSockets instead. Engineers building real-time Android apps struggled to make sure updates were reflected immediately when a user sent them. To solve this, they tried polling, which meant firing off a GET request to the server, say every five seconds, to a /messages endpoint.

The new bugsnag-kmp SDK is a unified error monitoring solution for Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) projects, enabling developers to track and monitor errors across Android, iOS, and web platforms from a single codebase. The new SDK works seamlessly on Android, iOS, and web browsers Native Integration, each one linking directly with our existing platform SDKs.

Imagine you own a car. It’s reliable, runs smoothly and gets you where you need to go. But one day, you realize you need a GPS navigation system for better routes. What do you do? Would you redesign the entire car just to integrate GPS, or would you simply install a GPS device on the dashboard? Of course, the smarter choice is to add the GPS instead of modifying the car’s built-in system. This is exactly how a Kotlin Extension Function works.

Last week, we got a question from one of our users asking us how to use Kotlin Apply. Specifically, the reader wanted to know whether it was best to use the apply function in their Android application, or another of the many Kotlin scope functions. So we got to thinking: Why not write an article about the whole topic of Kotlin scope functions? After all, they’re awesome: they let us write readable, concise code in Kotlin, and work with an object without the need for repeated references.

The when in Kotlin defines a conditional expression with more than one branch, that’s the statement you need to use when you want to write a Kotlin switch. In Java, we are using switch case statements. In Java, we need to define a break in each switch case, but in Kotlin we don’t need to. There are two ways you can use them in Kotlin. Either as a statement or as an expression.

Java and Kotlin have been at the forefront for Android development and beyond. Java, a very reliable language with over two decades of dominance, has shaped the foundation of countless software applications and systems. Kotlin, on the other hand, is a newer language designed to improve upon Java, offering modern syntax, enhanced safety, and greater developer productivity. But how do these languages compare in terms of features, performance, use cases, and community support?

Efficient handling of asynchronous data streams is an important tool of modern application development. Kotlin Flows, part of the Kotlin Coroutines library, provide a flexible and elegant solution for working with such data streams. Kotlin Flows are part of Kotlin Coroutines – unlike traditional callbacks or RxJava handling, which can be clunkier and may not directly integrate with your existing code structure easily.