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Best Free Android App Templates

· 4 min read
Full Stack Developer

Android development has skyrocketed in popularity within the last decade. Android devices dominate the mobile market, and with Kotlin now widely adopted, mobile developers have great tools for building beautiful, performant apps. In this article we list the best free Android app templates to help you speed up your projects.

Using a quality Kotlin starter kit not only saves hours of design and development, but also provides a Material design kit that speeds up implementation. A good template lets you focus on what makes your app unique instead of rebuilding common features. The list below contains open-source Android projects that follow Material guidelines and are written in Kotlin.

Without further ado, here are some top free Android app templates and starter kits.

1. CoCoin

With 2.4k GitHub stars, CoCoin is one of the most popular free Android app templates. It's a strong Kotlin starter kit for finance apps and supports many chart types — a great fit for financial/banking mobile apps.

If you're building an accounting or investment app, check out this open-source project first. Using a full-featured template reduces boilerplate and accelerates development.

2. SMS Messenger (QKSms)

Also known as QKSms, this messaging client is a solid free template. With 2.4k+ stars it provides a polished messaging experience. Note: QKSms is written in Java, so if you want a Kotlin-native starter, consider alternatives or use it for inspiration.

If you need a premium, backend-integrated chat template, see our Chat App Template, which includes more production-ready features.

3. TimberX

TimberX is a material-themed music player that supports phones, wear, auto and more. It's a great Kotlin starter kit for music apps and includes modern tooling such as Architecture Components, Room and DataBinding. Check similar projects like Simple Music Player for alternatives.

4. Aesthetic

Aesthetic is a dynamic theming engine powered by Rx and Kotlin. It makes theming simpler (light/dark mode, color sets) and provides many UI components like snack bars, card views and navigation. It's a useful toolkit to integrate into Kotlin apps.

5. Twidere

Twidere is an open-source Twitter client with features like multi-account support, dark mode and cloud sync. It's a good example of a full-featured Kotlin app and a great learning resource.

6. Material Dialogs

Material Dialogs is a polished, extensible API for dialogs in Kotlin. It includes pickers, bottom sheets, color pickers and more. This library is highly useful and can save a lot of engineering time.

7. Material Drawer Kit

Material Drawer Kit provides sidebar navigation components and menu features implemented in Kotlin. Use it if your app needs complex navigation drawers and menu items.

Create navigation drawers in your Activities and Fragments without having to write any XML, in pure Kotlin code, with access to all the features of the original library.

If you want theming alternatives, consider Cyanea.

Conclusion on Best Free Android App Templates

There are several free Android app templates available to bootstrap your projects. While Kotlin templates are fewer than some other ecosystems, the quality is improving and there are excellent starter kits to learn from and build upon.

At Instakotlin we are betting on Kotlin and Material design — keep an eye on new templates and starter kits that help reduce development cost and accelerate launches.

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