A Veterans Guide To Transitioning Android Teams Into Kotlin

Three years ago Instil made the strategic decision to transition all our Android teams from Java to Kotlin. Today we develop entirely in Kotlin for all JVM based projects, and are also exploring both Kotlin JS and Native. This talk will enable your developers to begin the same journey. We will be discussing: * What motivated us to make the switch, and whether these benefits were truly actualised. * How we incrementally converted existing applications and established guidelines for new projects. * Best practices we uncovered for interoperating with Java code and wrapping existing libraries. * Kotlin specific libraries and frameworks that we have adopted and benefitted from. * Coroutines as an exemplar of where the language simplified our existing architectures. * How we also benefit from using Kotlin in our build management and testing codebases. * Improvements we are hoping to make in the future, based on new language features. * Challenges we faced and things we would do differently were we starting over again. **What will the audience learn from this talk?** The audience will learn the advantages of moving Android teams to Kotlin, the challenges they are likely to face along the way and the techniques we developed for coping with them. **Does it feature code examples and/or live coding?** There will be a large number of code examples, which will be available to download after the talk. There will be live coding. **Prerequisite attendee experience level:** Level [300](https://gotocph.com/2019/pages/experience-level)