Mobile App Development Series Introduction

Wednesday, Jun 25, 2025 |

Mobile App Development (2 Parts Series)

1 Mobile App Development Series Introduction
2 Getting Started with Compose Multiplatform

In recent years, I've found myself needing to build a mobile app here or there, and it has been, at times, a bit of a struggle as the landscape -- and opinions about it -- are wide and varied. There are debates about native, hybrid, and cross-platform approaches, and once you've made that decision, you have to wade through a lot of opinions on what library to use. This is especially true for the non-native approaches. What I'd like to do, then, is provide a how-to on the approach I have settled on, with a complete, working application to help someone else get started.

What will follow here on my site is a series of posts that will describe how to get started with each architectural piece (that I'll outline below). In the process of this series, we'll build a gift-tracking application (if you attended my https://okcjug/org presentation in March of this year, you've seen some of this already). Since I'm a sucker for bad puns, we're going to riff on "Facebook" and call this "GiftBook". The premise is pretty simple:

You need to track gifts for multiple people
You will want to track multiple gift-giving occasions
Each person may have a target quantity or cost for each gift-giving occasion
For each person, you will want to track a list of gift ideas
Gift ideas used for one occasion will no longer be suggested for other occasions
On the home screen, you can select an occasion and see each recipient for that occasion, as well as a progress bar indicating how close to you are to being finished for that recipient

And so on. As with just about every project, there will likely be additional features pop up as we proceed, and we'll either implement those or file them away for a future version.

For the architecture, we'll use the following items:

Compose Multiplatform
Decompose
Android Room
Koin
KMP Form

While we (likely) won't use these in this application, I also plan to cover

Datastore
Ktor
Coil

A final note: I'm a big believer in sharing what you know, even as you're learning it. There are parts of this application that will change over time as I continue to learn and refine, so you can expect some changes in already-published posts. Or maybe a follow-up. At any rate, if you're interested in mobile application development and are looking for a place to start, I hope this will be a good one. Let get started.