Brussels / 1 & 2 February 2020


Migrating FOSDEM Companion to Kotlin

FOSDEM Companion is currently the most used mobile application at FOSDEM. It has been around since 2014 and is updated every year. In 2020, it's finally made the big leap to Kotlin!

The app has been entirely rewritten using the Kotlin programming language. This talk will cover the conversion process, and how the new code makes use of language features and APIs that are not available in Java to become more than a simple Java conversion.

For example, we'll talk about:

  • How Data classes and Parcelize remove a lot of boilerplate code in the model classes
  • How immutability and null safety have been enforced in the code with minimal effort
  • How KTX makes Android framework and Jetpack APIs more Kotlin-friendly
  • Coroutines integration in the app.

The talk will be illustrated by many code examples.

Intended audiences: Android developers with medium experience looking to improve their Kotlin codebases. Java developers curious about Kotlin.


Christophe Beyls