What you're going to build

Welcome to PawWalk Academy — Android edition

By the end of this course you will have built PawWalk — a real Android app where dog owners find walkers, book and pay for walks, and watch their dog's walk live on a map with GPS. It's not a toy: the finished app already lives in this repository at apps/android, and every lesson here teaches you to rebuild a real piece of it, file by file.

You need zero Kotlin, Android, or Jetpack Compose knowledge to start. We begin with "what is a variable" and end with an AI assistant that can draft a booking for you.

Already done the iOS track? Great — the concepts rhyme on purpose (let → val, @State → remember), so a lot of this will feel like a second pass. Never touched Swift either? Also fine — this course assumes nothing.

The app, in one screenshot tour

• Auth — sign up / log in as a dog owner or a walker. Sessions survive app restarts thanks to encrypted on-device storage.
• Home — a designed dashboard with your walk stats and recent walks.
• Walkers — browse walkers, their ratings and prices, and book one.
• Bookings — create a booking, watch its status move from pending → confirmed → in progress → completed.
• Live tracking — a screen showing the walk happening in real time, fed by GPS.
• AI assistant — chat with an assistant that can draft a booking for you.

How the pieces talk

The Android app is a client. It talks HTTP + JSON to a Python backend (FastAPI) that owns the database. The backend is already built and already running in this repo — your job in this course is the Android side. It's the exact same backend the iOS app talks to.

You'll see the phrase API contract a lot. It's the agreement about exactly what JSON the backend sends and expects — written down in docs/API-CONTRACT.md. The Kotlin code you write will mirror it precisely.