android-native-dev

A guide for Android native application development and UI design, intended to be read before starting Android native work. It covers Material Design 3, Kotlin and Jetpack Compose development, project configuration, accessibility, and build troubleshooting, drawing on Material Design 3 guidelines, Android developer documentation, Google Play quality guidelines, and WCAG accessibility guidelines. It opens with a project scenario assessment that classifies the current state - empty directory, project with a Gradle Wrapper, Android Studio project, or incomplete project - and prescribes the right approach for each, with a key principle that 'gradlew assembleDebug' should succeed before any business logic is written.

Project configuration is detailed concretely. It lists a required-files checklist (gradle.properties, settings.gradle.kts, root and module build.gradle.kts, the Gradle wrapper, AndroidManifest.xml, MainActivity.kt, and res resources) and shows a gradle.properties enabling AndroidX and Jetifier with build optimization and adjustable JVM memory settings. Dependencies are declared using the Compose BOM alongside activity-compose and lifecycle-viewmodel-compose. A substantial section covers build variants and product flavors: defining flavor dimensions, creating dev/staging/prod flavors with applicationIdSuffix, versionNameSuffix, buildConfigField, and resValue, configuring debug and release build types, the '{flavor}{BuildType}' variant naming, and Gradle commands to list, assemble, and install specific variants. It also notes that from AGP 8.0 BuildConfig must be explicitly enabled via buildFeatures, shows flavor-specific source sets, and demonstrates multiple flavor dimensions.

Kotlin development standards round it out. A naming-convention table covers classes, functions, constants, packages, and Composables, and code standards emphasize null safety (preferring safe calls and defaults or let over the non-null assertion operator) and disciplined exception handling rather than broad try-catch blocks that swallow errors. Practical notes address build memory tuning for OutOfMemoryError and other common build issues.