Context
Mobile users needing periodic or event-driven data synchronization between mobile device storage and remote servers often face network drops, state drift, and unhandled offline conditions.
What I built
- Developed a native Android application in Kotlin using modern Jetpack Compose declarative UI architecture.
- Built a companion Django REST Framework backend service handling payload ingestion, timestamped synchronization logs, and state reconciliation.
- Implemented background synchronization utilities and containerized server infrastructure using Docker.
Technical approach
- Android client utilizes Kotlin Coroutines and StateFlow for reactive UI state management and asynchronous background operations without UI thread blockage.
- Sync protocols utilize timestamp-based delta checks to identify local records requiring upload or remote updates requiring client-side pull.
- The Django backend exposes serialized endpoints for conflict resolution, session validation, and batch record ingestion.
- Docker Compose handles isolated development and server testing environments.
Security and verification
- API requests require token-based authentication headers verified on every synchronization handshake.
- Client-side error handling traps network timeouts and offline states, queuing updates locally until connectivity is restored.
- Test suites verify payload serialization, timestamp ordering, and error recovery on intermittent connection drops.
Current limits
- Academic Android final project running in development and local emulator environments.
- Advanced multi-master peer-to-peer conflict resolution (e.g. CRDTs) is not implemented; server timestamp wins in conflict scenarios.