LaunchedEffect(Unit) runs once, and that is usually the wrong once
Keyed to Unit means once per composition entry — not once per screen visit, and not once per user.
Engineering
Compose, Kotlin, and multiplatform work — the mechanism under the symptom.
229 posts
Two lines of autofill are worth more than a week of form polish
Compose's autofill is a semantics property on a text field. Declaring content types lets password managers and the platform fill forms correctly, and omitting it is why users abandon sign-up.
A LazyColumn without keys loses your scroll position and your animations
Without a key, item identity is positional — so an insert at the top reuses every slot's state for the wrong item.
Modifier order is not style, it is semantics
padding then clickable gives a different touch target from clickable then padding — and both look identical.
Recomposition is not re-rendering, and that is why your list stutters
Compose re-executes functions whose inputs changed. An unstable parameter means all of them.
Your custom font has a fallback, and you didn't choose it
A custom font covers a subset of Unicode. Everything outside it falls back, and the fallback decides how your app renders emoji, non-Latin scripts and symbols — usually without anyone checking.
iosTest needs a booted simulator, and CI does not have one by default
The native test binary runs on a device, so a missing simulator reads like a toolchain problem.
Image loading is the least portable thing in your shared UI
Decode, cache and memory pressure are platform concerns, and the composable that hides them decides your scroll performance.
A feature flag read on four platforms needs one source of truth and four caches
Flags that differ per platform at the same moment produce bug reports nobody can reproduce.
A dependency that resolves in commonMain and only exists on Android
Gradle metadata decides which variant each target gets. A library with no native artifact fails at link, not at resolution.
Shared navigation has no back stack owner, and that is the hard part
Android has a system back gesture with an owner. iOS has a navigation controller. A shared back stack answers to both.
KSP runs once per target, and your generated code can disagree with itself
A processor sees one compilation at a time. Generating into commonMain is a race you win by accident.