Kotlin Flow Patterns Every Senior Android Dev Must Know

What We're Building In this workshop, I'll walk you through four Kotlin Flow patterns that separate production-grade Android code from tutorial-level code. By the end, you'll have working implementations of: Correct sharing strategies with shareIn and stateIn Backpressure handling with conflate and buffer Resilient retry logic with exponential backoff Deterministic Flow tests with Turbine Let me show you a pattern I use in every project — and the mistakes I see even experienced developers make. Prerequisites Kotlin coroutines basics (suspend functions, CoroutineScope ) Familiarity with Flow , StateFlow , and SharedFlow An Android project using viewModelScope (Jetpack lifecycle 2.5+) Turbine added to your test dependencies Step 1: Pick the Right Sharing Strategy Here's the gotcha that will save you hours: stateIn conflates by design. If your upstream emits faster than collectors consume, intermediate values are dropped. That's perfect for UI state. It's devastating for one-shot events l