5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Writing My First Android App

This article is for beginners building their first Android app using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. So I decided to build an Android app. How hard could it be, right? Turns out — pretty hard. Not impossible, but full of surprises that nobody warns you about. I'm still learning, but I've already collected a solid list of "why didn't anyone tell me this?" moments. Here are the five biggest ones. 1. Architecture Isn't Just for Big Projects When I started, I threw everything into one file. Logic, UI, data fetching — all living together in one giant MainActivity.kt. It worked… until it didn't. The moment I needed to change something, I'd break something else. I had no idea what MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) was, and honestly the name scared me off. Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier: Architecture isn't about being fancy. It's about not hating your own code two weeks later. Even for a small app, separating your UI (the View) from your logic (the ViewModel) makes everything easier to r