DEV Community: Raj javiya

I Built GuideFlow: A Modern Android Onboarding SDK in Kotlin

Raj javiya — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:26:45 +0000

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Passion Edition

🚀 GuideFlow – Building the Android Onboarding SDK I Always Wanted

Every Android developer has probably built an onboarding or feature-tour system at least once. I certainly have—and every time, I found myself solving the same problems: spotlight overlays, tooltip positioning, scrolling to views, handling different screen types, remembering completed tours, and making everything feel polished.

Instead of rebuilding the same solution for every project, I decided to create something reusable for the Android community.

That's how GuideFlow was born.

GuideFlow is a modern, lightweight, and flexible Android SDK that helps developers build beautiful onboarding experiences with just a few lines of Kotlin.

Fully built in Kotlin, 100% host-agnostic, completely XML-free under the hood, and designed with developer experience in mind.

What I Built

GuideFlow is an open-source Android SDK for creating interactive onboarding flows and feature tours.

Rather than spending days implementing overlays, animations, tooltip positioning, scrolling logic, and state management, developers can integrate GuideFlow in minutes and focus on building great user experiences.

GuideFlow is now published on Maven Central, making it easy to integrate into any Android project using a single Gradle dependency.

Key Features

🎯 Works with Activity, Fragment, DialogFragment, BottomSheetDialogFragment, and standalone View.
✨ Beautiful spotlight animations with multiple cutout shapes.
🧩 Automatic scrolling for RecyclerView, ScrollView, NestedScrollView, and ViewPager2.
🎨 Fully customizable themes with Material You support.
♿ Accessibility-first with automatic TalkBack announcements.
💾 Built-in persistence to remember completed tours.
🔀 Conditional onboarding steps.
➕ Runtime step insertion and removal.
▶️ Resume interrupted tours automatically.
📄 JSON-driven onboarding for remote configuration.
🖌️ Fully customizable tooltip UI.

Demo

🚀 Available on Maven Central

dependencies {
    implementation("io.github.javiyaraj:guideflow:1.0.1")
}

📦 Maven Central

https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/io.github.javiyaraj/guideflow

💻 GitHub Repository

https://github.com/JAVIYARAJ/guide_flow_sdk

Example:

GuideFlow.with(this)
    .setTourId("home_onboarding")
    .setTheme(TourTheme.dark())
    .addStep(
        GuideStep(
            targetView = fab,
            title = "Create New Item",
            description = "Tap here to add a new item."
        )
    )
    .addStep(
        GuideStep(
            targetView = menu,
            title = "Settings",
            description = "Customize your experience here."
        )
    )
    .start()

Code

The complete source code is available on GitHub:

GitHub Repository

https://github.com/JAVIYARAJ/guide_flow_sdk

GuideFlow is open source under the MIT License, and contributions, bug reports, feature requests, and feedback are always welcome.

How I Built It

GuideFlow is written entirely in Kotlin with a strong focus on performance, flexibility, and developer experience.

Instead of creating another simple tooltip library, I wanted to solve the real-world challenges Android developers face while implementing onboarding.

Kotlin DSL

The SDK uses a fluent Kotlin DSL, making onboarding flows easy to read and write.

GuideFlow.with(this)
    .addStep(...)
    .addStep(...)
    .start()

The API was designed to feel natural while remaining highly configurable.

Smart Tour Engine

Instead of displaying every step sequentially, GuideFlow evaluates each step before showing it.

This makes it possible to:

Skip unavailable features automatically.
Show Premium-only onboarding.
Personalize tours for different users.
Dynamically react to application state.

Example:

GuideStep(
    targetView = premiumCard,
    title = "Premium Analytics",
    description = "Available for premium users.",
    condition = { user.isPremium() }
)

Runtime Tour Modification

Applications change while users interact with them.

GuideFlow allows developers to modify tours at runtime.

tour.addStepAfter("login_step", profileStep)

tour.removeStep("premium_step")

This enables highly dynamic onboarding experiences.

JSON-Driven Tours

One feature I'm especially proud of is the ability to build complete onboarding flows from JSON.

This allows developers to:

Update onboarding remotely.
Run A/B experiments.
Build server-controlled tutorials.
Launch marketing campaigns without releasing a new app update.

Host-Agnostic Architecture

GuideFlow isn't tied to Activities.

It works seamlessly with:

Activity
Fragment
DialogFragment
BottomSheetDialogFragment
Standalone View

This flexibility required designing the rendering engine independently from the Android component hosting the tour.

Accessibility

Accessibility wasn't treated as an optional feature.

GuideFlow automatically announces every onboarding step through TalkBack, ensuring visually impaired users receive the same guided experience.

Persistence

Nothing is more frustrating than seeing the same onboarding every time an app launches.

GuideFlow automatically remembers completed tours and only shows them again when developers explicitly choose to reset them.

Challenges I Faced

Building GuideFlow involved solving much more than drawing spotlight animations.

Some of the biggest challenges included:

Supporting multiple Android UI containers.
Correctly calculating overlay positions.
Automatically scrolling nested containers.
Handling RecyclerView items that aren't currently visible.
Maintaining smooth animations without sacrificing performance.
Designing a simple API while supporting advanced features.
Creating an architecture that would remain maintainable as the SDK grows.

Every challenge helped shape the final architecture and API.

Why This Project Matters to Me

I genuinely enjoy building tools that help other developers.

Throughout my Android journey, I've learned so much from open-source libraries, and GuideFlow is my way of giving something back to the community.

Publishing GuideFlow to Maven Central was a huge milestone. It transformed a personal side project into a reusable SDK that any Android developer can integrate into production with a single dependency.

This project has taught me a tremendous amount about SDK design, Android rendering, API design, accessibility, and developer experience.

What's Next?

GuideFlow is just getting started.

My roadmap includes:

🎨 Jetpack Compose support.
📱 More sample applications.
🌍 Better documentation.
⚡ Performance improvements.
🧪 Expanded test coverage.
🤝 Community contributions.
💡 More customization options.

Prize Categories

I'm submitting this as a general Weekend Challenge entry.

Thank you for taking the time to read about GuideFlow!

If you're an Android developer, I'd love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, or feature ideas.

⭐ If you find the project useful, please consider starring the repository on GitHub. It helps the project reach more developers and motivates me to keep improving it.

Happy coding! 🚀

Orbit — From Abandoned Solo Tool to Full Team Platform with GitHub Copilot

Raj javiya — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:54:05 +0000

This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge

What I Built

Orbit is a web-based productivity and project management platform built for developers and small teams. It replaces the entire stack of tools a dev team juggles — GitHub, Vercel, Google Calendar, task manager, notes, time tracker, and learning tracker — inside one fast, keyboard-first interface.

I started Orbit because I was tired of switching between 6 different tabs to manage one project. The core was functional, but the platform was still a solo tool. Half the features were disabled behind Firebase Remote Config flags, waiting to be finished. This challenge was the push I needed.

Stack: React 19 · Vite · Supabase · Firebase · FullCalendar · Google Calendar API · GitHub API · Vercel API · Recharts · Cloudinary

Demo

🔗 Live: orbit-sand-alpha.vercel.app
🐙 GitHub: github.com/JAVIYARAJ/orbit

The Comeback Story

I started Orbit on May 14 and paused on May 22 — 8 days in, I had a solid but single-player prototype.

Before — Paused on May 22

✅ Projects, Kanban Tasks, Notes, Timer, Dev Toolkit, Vault, Analytics
❌ No task assignment — nobody owned anything
❌ No task comments — teams had to leave Orbit to talk
❌ No file attachments on tasks
❌ No invite flow — completely single-player
❌ No notifications — actions happened silently
❌ Google Calendar was a stub with no real sync
❌ Learning Path had no sessions or analytics
❌ 8 of 16 modules disabled behind feature flags

After — Shipped June 2–7 with GitHub Copilot

✅ Team invite flow with email, accept/decline, and role-based access
✅ Role-based permission matrix — Owner / Admin / Member / Viewer
✅ Task assignment with member avatars on cards
✅ Real-time task comments powered by Supabase Realtime
✅ Jira-style file attachments with drag-and-drop zone
✅ Full notification center covering all event types
✅ Two-way Google Calendar sync with FullCalendar UI
✅ Recurring events — daily, weekly, custom
✅ Google Meet link auto-attached to calendar events
✅ Selective sync settings — choose what Orbit pushes to Google Calendar
✅ Agenda digest on home dashboard — "Today: 3 tasks due, 2 meetings"
✅ Learning Path — sessions, tags, weekly goals, analytics charts
✅ Global Search across all modules
✅ UX polish — density toggle, weekend hide, notification bell
✅ All 16 modules live

In 6 days, Orbit went from a solo prototype to a full team platform.

My Experience with GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot was central to finishing Orbit inside this challenge window. Here's where it made the real difference:

Invite & Permissions Flow
The invite system was the biggest blocker — token generation, pending invite state, accept/decline handling, and edge cases like expired links and duplicate invites. Copilot scaffolded the full flow including edge cases I hadn't specified yet. What would've been 2 days took an afternoon.

Real-Time Task Comments
I asked Copilot for the right pattern to subscribe to live comment updates using Supabase. It gave me the exact Postgres change subscription approach immediately — working real-time comments in under an hour.

Recurring Events Architecture
Before writing any code I asked Copilot whether to store the RRULE string or expand instances for Google Calendar sync. It explained that storing the RRULE maps 1:1 to Google Calendar's recurrence field and FullCalendar's rrule plugin — one string, three consumers, no translation layer. That single design decision prevented sync bugs down the line.

Permission Matrix Review
I shared my permission matrix and asked what was missing. Copilot flagged that delete project should be owner-only, the Vault should default-locked for all non-owner roles, and changing roles should require owner-level authorization. All three made it into the shipped system.

The honest summary: Copilot didn't write Orbit — every suggestion was reviewed and adjusted for my specific data model. But it compressed what would have been 2–3 weeks of work into 6 days by cutting through unfamiliar API territory fast, helping make architecture decisions early, and catching edge cases before they hit production.