Android app development best practices in 2025 are based on a Compose-first Kotlin stack, high security with Play Integrity, and modern cryptography and performance with Baseline Profiles and Intensive testing. Not taking those patterns into account is a risk to reliability, compliance, and user retention that can be avoided.
2025 Android Architecture & Tech Stack
Android applications made today need to adopt a layered architecture as there are separate concerns: UI, domain, and data. ViewModels, unidirectional data flow, and repositories provide teams with an anticipated structure of complex products.
One of them is a 2025-ready baseline beginning with the language and core stack. Only Kotlin should be used with a structure of concurrency, based on Coroutines and Flow. Standard patterns for lifecycle, dependency injection, persistence, and background work are offered through Jetpack libraries like ViewModel, Navigation, Hilt, Room, DataStore, and WorkManager.
The toolkit at the UI layer should be Jetpack Compose, and one should only use XML in legacy screens. The UI is unidirectional, where the ViewModels create an immutable state, which is rendered in the UI, and events are returned to the ViewModels as intents. The principle of state restoration should be based on rememberSaveable and ViewModel state, which means that user journeys are not polluted by configuration changes and process death.
The domain layer contains business rules within use cases or interactors that are not specific to the type of Android framework, whereas the data layer provides repositories of local stores and remote APIs. Android development guidelines can be enforced by clean mapping between Android development entities and UI models, preventing leakage of transport models into the UI.
In case teams do not have experience in building such architecture, they tend to recruit Android partners who have the expertise to bootstrap this architecture. Companies, such as Redwerk, specialize in Android development, such as Kotlin migrations, Jetpack Compose implementation, performance audits, and preparation for the Play Store. A partnership with Redwerk would help in enhancing modernization and keeping the stack on course with the current Android development guidelines.
Security, Privacy, and Compliance in Modern Android Apps
Defense in depth, Play Integrity alignment, and OWASP mobile standards define security best practices for Android app development. The security should be built into flows and APIs.
- Attest using Play Integrity API and do away with SafetyNet. Verify tokens on a server and supply verdicts to risk scoring and access control, particularly applications that deal with payment or sensitive data.
- Prioritize secrecy and isolation of sensitive data. Android Keystore is where the keys are stored, not in the code nor the shared preferences. Modern algorithms should be used for sensitive data at rest, and short-lived tokens should be renewed in a secure manner. Platform APIs should be based on biometric prompts and device credential checks to track UX and security capabilities of the OS.
- Implement TLS and API hardening. Everything should be based on HTTPS with strict TLS settings, and in cases of high risks, certificate pinning may be implemented when necessary in high-risk applications. Be suspicious of all the devices, even when it is your legitimate application requesting.
- Authentication and authorization are supposed to be based on OpenID of PKCE and OAuth 2.1. Refresh tokens are stored server-side where feasible; they must be stored on encrypted storage with hard rotation and expiry on the device. Android development based on OWASP MASVS and R8 obfuscation as non-negotiable obfuscation rules blocks numerous frequent attack vectors.
Performance and Reliability Guidelines for 2025
By the end of 2025, users will be expecting a rapid start-up and seamless interaction. The ability to meet such expectations will be through quantifiable targets and rigorous Android development techniques.
- The cold start and primary navigation should have a baseline profile and a startup profile, which, when shipped with the app, are to be checked with Macrobenchmark tests.
- Design must also be planned in compose performance. Working with composables needs to be replaced by heavy work that gets pushed out to ViewModels or background layers, and the results of this work are to be exposed as a stable state. Create remember and immutable models in order to reduce recompositions, and profile hot screens using Android Studio tools.
- Your application must be designed with big screens, folds, and multi-windows as the default. Adaptive layouts are necessitated by responsive layouts, which need to incorporate adaptive navigation and panes that scale with the size of the window, and navigation graphs and state need to be resistant to changes in window size, without glitches or lost state.
- Offline behavior and background work should not violate the platform’s expectations. Use WorkManager for deferrable tasks that need to survive process death and restarts, and reserve foreground services that are visible to a user and are ongoing, like navigation or media playback. The offline-first design, local caching, solid timeouts, and retry policies with backoff will ensure that the UI remains responsive even on a bad network.
Testing, Observability, and CI/CD Practices
In order to maintain quality with the expansion of the codebase, teams should have the Android development methods where testing and observability are integrated into daily tasks.
- Begin with a stratified test plan. Domain and data layer unit tests must be done, and critical integrations of the framework must be checked. In the case of the UI, Espresso should be used with legacy View-based screens, and Jetpack Compose Testing APIs would be used to test Compose UIs using semantics and user behavior.
- The next safety net is the number of tools used in code quality and static analysis. Run ktlint or some other formatter and Detekt on Kotlin code smells and architecture violations. Turn on Android Lint and configure rules to align with your rules and run all tests in CI.
- Centralized and structured logging should be in the form of JSON using correlation IDs and should be supplemented by performance, reliability, and crash health key metrics.
- Build, test, and release should be automated using CI/CD pipelines. They are supposed to make the app, test, and do a static analysis, instrumentation, and UI test on devices, sign, and push the artifacts to internal and public tracks. A short release checklist would ensure that each build is in line with your Android building rules.
Adopting Modern Android Practices in 2025
In 2025, modern Android is a tangible collection of Android guidelines, based on Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, layered architecture, Baseline Profiles for speed, security associated with Play Integrity, and CI/CD imposing quality. Organizations that internalize such best practices in the development of Android apps deliver faster and easily evolvable apps.
This outline can be used as a useful checklist to streamline the architecture that is recommended, adopt Compose and Baseline Profiles, embrace Play Integrity and strong cryptography, and cycle the process with serious testing and observability. This is the way you can create Android applications in 2025 that will satisfy the users, pay attention to the limitations of the platform, and will be maintainable.