Hiring Android Developers: Kotlin and Jetpack Compose Checklist
Android's device diversity makes experience matter. Use this checklist to hire an Android developer who builds fast, stable apps.
To hire an Android developer, check modern Kotlin and Jetpack Compose skills, a clean MVVM architecture with dependency injection, coroutines and Flow for async work, offline-first data handling, and experience improving stability through Android vitals on Google Play.
The checklist
Language and UI
- Idiomatic Kotlin: null safety, data classes, extension functions.
- Jetpack Compose with Material 3, state hoisting and recomposition awareness.
- Ability to maintain XML views in older screens.
Architecture
- MVVM or MVI with ViewModels and a repository layer.
- Hilt or Koin for dependency injection.
- Modularisation for larger apps.
Async and data
- Coroutines and Flow.
- Room for local persistence.
- WorkManager for background sync.
- Retrofit or Ktor for networking.
Quality
- Unit tests and Compose UI tests.
- Crashlytics or Sentry monitoring.
- Performance profiling for jank and memory.
Release
- Play Console, staged rollouts, app bundles and signing.
- Reducing crashes and ANRs flagged by Android vitals.
Why device testing matters
Android runs on thousands of devices with different screen sizes, memory and OS versions. Ask how candidates test across devices — real phones, emulators and device farms — and how they handle low-memory phones common in many markets.
Interview questions
- How do you prevent unnecessary recompositions in Compose?
- How would you design offline sync for a field-service app?
- What causes an ANR, and how have you fixed one?
Pair Android developers with a QA tester for device coverage and an iOS developer for full mobile coverage. Explore our Android developers.
