Kotlin Weekly #-512!

KotlinConf’26 Keynote Highlights: Advances in Language Design, Tooling, AI-Driven Workflows, and Multiplatform Development (blog.jetbrains.com) In this article, Daria Voronina summarizes some of the highlights from the KotlinConf Keynote of this year.

Introducing a Security Support Policy for the Kotlin Standard Library (blog.jetbrains.com) JetBrains has introduced a new security support policy for the Kotlin standard library, committing to provide security backports for each Kotlin release line for 18 months from its initial release.

Official Kotlin Support for Visual Studio Code Is Now Available in Alpha (blog.jetbrains.com) JetBrains has released an official Kotlin extension for Visual Studio Code in Alpha, bringing core language support like code completion, navigation, and diagnostics powered by the Kotlin Language Server.

Built for Productivity: What the Data Finally Shows About Kotlin (blog.jetbrains.com) A JetBrains study of 28 million development cycles found that Kotlin developers are 15–20% more productive than Java users, and that Kotlin projects better maintain their speed as codebases age.

Build native Android apps in Google AI Studio (android-developers.googleblog.com) Google AI Studio now allows you to build native Kotlin-based Android apps directly in your browser using natural language prompts, complete with an embedded emulator, instant device installation, and a seamless handoff to Android Studio.

[SPONSORED] Mobile observability shouldn’t suck (bitdrift.io) Your customer lives in the real world, and it’s messy: Intermittent connections, mid-onboarding drop-offs, force quits… Unlike other observability tools, bitdrift captures 100% of real-time data, unsampled across 1B+ installs, so you and your agents can query reality. Try bitdrift: mobile observability for the real world.

From Spaghetti to Strict: Cleaning Up Gradle Dependencies in a large Android codebase (emartynov.medium.com) Eugen Martynov shares how their team successfully cleaned up dependencies in a large multi-module Android codebase over five months by adopting the Dependency Analysis Gradle Plugin and building custom automation to enforce project-specific conventions.

Metro DI for KMP mobile: From God Objects and manually checked Singletons to Compile-Time Injection (funkymuse.dev) FunkyMuse details their journey of replacing a God Object manual dependency injection pattern with the Metro DI framework in a large Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) project, enabling compile-time safety, modularized scoping across Android/iOS/Desktop, and improved testability via injected fakes.

Beyond the Screen: Component-Level ViewModels in Compose (saurabharora.dev) Saurabh Arora explores Lifecycle 2.11’s new rememberViewModelStoreOwner() and ViewModelStoreProvider APIs, which enable fine-grained ViewModel scoping to specific UI components rather than just entire screens.

The Modern Guide to Android SDK Development: Architecture & API Design (Part 1 of 3) (proandroiddev.com) Dmytro Petrenko’s guide to building Android SDKs emphasizes an API-first approach, focusing on explicit initialization, reactive state management via StateFlow, defensive thread safety, and strict internal visibility to ensure stable, consumer-friendly libraries.

Polished Compose course (2 weeks): pixel-perfect UI with styling and motion (www.polishedcompose.com) Pixel-perfect UI is not about precision alone - it’s about repeatability. Without systems, styling and motion diverge across features. This 2-week online course covers design tokens, theming, and animation patterns. Registration is open. Details are available.

Go Beyond Rows & Columns: Advanced Compose Cheat Sheet for Custom Layouts and Drawing (cheat-sheet.kt.academy) Take full control of the UI tree. Master the layout modifier for custom measurement logic and use graphicsLayer for GPU-accelerated transformations. Learn to use drawWithCache and drawWithContent to optimize complex custom drawing. Essential for Senior UI Engineers.

Introducing Touch Robot, for writing interactive screenshot tests in Compose UI (saket.me) Touch Robot is a new library for generating interactive, animated screenshot tests in Compose UI by simulating touch events like clicks and swipes with Paparazzi.

epub4kmp (github.com) A Kotlin Multiplatform library for reading, writing, and manipulating EPUB files.

kotlin-csv (github.com) kotlin-csv has released version 2.0.0, updating the pure Kotlin Multiplatform CSV reader and writer library with refined semantics and improved multiplatform support.

Material 3 Compose Unstyled (github.com) material-3-compose-unstyled by Alex Styl offers an implementation of Material 3 components built on Compose Unstyled primitives for platform-agnostic, ARIA-accessible UI that remains compatible with MaterialTheme.

PdfKmp (github.com) A Kotlin Multiplatform PDF generator for Android and iOS — vector-first, type-safe, DSL-driven.

kmp-migration-skill (github.com) An agent skill for migrating Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) projects from the old composeApp single-module structure to the new default structure introduced in May 2026.

Some (github.com) A Kotlin JVM library that generates populated instances of any Kotlin class for testing purposes, with zero configuration required.

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