Qodana
The code quality platform for teams
Qodana for Android: Increasing Code Quality for Kotlin-First Teams
When people think about tooling for Android development, the conversation often gravitates towards platform-specific concerns: UI performance, layout validation, device compatibility, or resource management. Yet for many Android teams, the most persistent challenges don’t sit at the platform level – they’re in the team’s Kotlin codebase itself.
As Android projects scale, Kotlin brings strong language features, but it doesn’t eliminate complexity. Null safety can still be misused, functions grow unchecked, architectural boundaries blur, and code style diverges across teams. This is where Qodana for Android becomes more relevant.
Qodana is not an Android framework tool, and it doesn’t aim to replace Android-specific tooling such as Android Lint. Instead, it focuses on Kotlin code quality, automation, and consistency, which are central concerns for modern Android development.
In the past, you might have seen Developer Advocate Anton Arhipov showing users how Qodana works with Kotlin to improve code quality for Android developers.
Qodana has advanced significantly since then, and the needs of Android developers have grown, too.
Kotlin as the common denominator in Android teams
At JetBrains, we’re proud of having created Kotlin. While Kotlin is a powerful, multi-purpose language used for backend development and for building cross-platform applications across mobile, desktop, and web, it’s also widely recognized as the primary language for Android development. That’s why bringing strong code quality tooling like Qodana to Android teams is so important.
Within these teams, Kotlin is also used beyond the mobile app itself. Shared libraries, test infrastructure, build tooling, and even backend services are increasingly written in the language.
This creates a need for consistent Kotlin standards across different parts of an organization. In practice, however, consistency is difficult to maintain. Local IDE inspections vary, CI checks are often incomplete, and code review standards depend heavily on individual reviewers.
Qodana for Android addresses this gap by allowing Android teams to enforce Kotlin inspections automatically and consistently in CI systems, using the same inspection engine that developers already rely on in Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA. This alignment is critical. When local feedback and automated checks disagree, developers lose trust in both.
Creating a CI-first quality gate with code analysis
Most issues that slow Android teams down are not catastrophic runtime failures. They are incremental quality regressions: overly complex methods, fragile null handling, unused code, or visibility issues that make refactoring harder over time.
Qodana runs Kotlin static analysis as part of the software development lifecycle, shifting quality checks earlier and making them repeatable. Rather than relying on manual code reviews to catch everything, teams can use Qodana as a quality gate that highlights high-impact issues before code is merged.
This is particularly valuable for Android projects with multiple modules, long-lived feature branches, or distributed teams. Automated analysis ensures that quality expectations don’t change depending on who reviews the pull request.
What Qodana for Android is, and what it’s not
It is important to be precise about what Qodana does in an Android context.
What Qodana for Android does:
- Analyze Kotlin code used in Android projects
- Automate Kotlin quality checks in CI
- Align IDE inspections with automated enforcement
- Support scalable quality management across teams
- Analyze project layouts and resources
What Qodana for Android does not do:
- Replace Android Lint
- Analyze device-specific behavior
- Provide Android framework diagnostics
Qodana can complement existing Android tooling rather than compete with it.
Automation and the reality of scale
As Android teams grow, review capacity does not scale linearly with team size. Kotlin helps reduce certain classes of errors, but it doesn’t replace the need for disciplined code structure and readability.
Qodana supports this reality through automation. By codifying Kotlin quality rules and running them consistently, teams can remove repetitive review comments and focus human attention on business logic and product decisions.
This is not about replacing developers’ judgment – it’s about reserving that judgment for where it adds the most value.
Kotlin quality beyond the Android boundary
One of the less obvious advantages of using Qodana in Android contexts is that it does not stop at the Android module boundary. Many Android teams share Kotlin code across mobile and non-mobile components, and maintaining consistent standards across those environments is often challenging.
Because Qodana operates at the language and project level, it allows teams to apply the same Kotlin inspections across shared libraries and supporting systems. This reduces fragmentation and helps organizations treat Kotlin as a strategic language rather than a platform-specific implementation detail.
In fact, the official Kotlin team even uses Qodana for internal quality and security.
Practical quality check adoption for existing Android codebases
One of the biggest barriers to adopting stricter quality checks is existing technical debt. Many Android projects are years old, and introducing a new tool that flags thousands of issues is rarely productive.
Qodana is designed to support gradual adoption. Teams can baseline existing issues, focus on preventing new regressions, and incrementally tighten standards over time. This makes it viable for real-world Android projects rather than only greenfield applications.
The ability to configure inspections, tailor rulesets, and control enforcement levels is essential for long-term success.
A Kotlin-centric view of Android development
Seen through a Kotlin-first lens, Qodana for Android is less about the platform and more about discipline. It helps teams treat code quality as an automated, shared responsibility rather than a manual afterthought.
For Android teams working primarily in Kotlin, especially those operating at scale or across multiple domains, this focus is both practical and necessary. Quality issues compound quietly over time, and automation is one of the few reliable ways to keep them under control.
Increase quality and security with Qodana
Android development today is as much about managing complexity as it is about building features. Kotlin provides powerful tools, but without consistent enforcement and automation, even well-intentioned teams drift.
Qodana for Android offers a way to bring Kotlin code quality into the foreground of the development process, embedding it into CI and aligning it with developers’ existing workflows. It is not an Android-specific analyzer, but for Kotlin-driven Android teams, that is precisely its strength.
Let’s talk at KotlinConf 2026!
Join JetBrains for the most important Kotlin event of the year and find out how Qodana can help your team boost code quality – right from the source. Take part in workshops and tech sessions at various levels, get direct access to the JetBrains team, network with other Kotlin enthusiasts, bag exclusive goodies, and attend the Golden Kodee Awards Ceremony.
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