Shipaton 2025 - Day 9 - Home Screen Foundation
Day 9 of my Shipaton 2025 journey lays the Home screen foundation: set a post-auth Home start destination, built a Jetpack Compose Scaffold, and wired NavHost (Onboarding → Auth → Home). The app now runs end-to-end after sign-in, speeding up iterations.
Mantas Butenas
8/10/20251 min read
What I Built Today
Today was about laying the first bricks of the post-auth experience.
✔️ I created a dedicated Home route and set it as the start destination after sign-in. On that screen, I put down a clean Jetpack Compose Scaffold with a top app bar shell and a content container so that I have a consistent place to plug future components.
✔️ I also wired the Home screen into the NavHost, so the flow now runs Onboarding → Auth → Home without detours. I’m intentionally keeping the screen lean for now.
🎯 The big win: the app finally runs end-to-end after sign-in, which means I can iterate much faster from here.
Why the Home Screen Matters
✅ Clear post-auth landing: Users know exactly where they arrive after sign-in.
✅ One scaffold to rule them all: Centralized top app bar and snackbars handling make global UI changes trivial.
✅ Stable start destination: Simplifies deep links, session restore, and back-stack behavior.
✅ Future-proof layout: A clean content container makes it easy to drop in the greeting, “Continue where you left off”, quick actions, and stats without rework.
Navigation Flow is Real
Hooking Home into the NavHost made the navigation feel like a real app, not a demo. The transitions are predictable, the back stack behaves, and I can test sign-in flows without jumping through hoops.
Why this helps:
✅ Faster iteration: I can boot straight into a signed-in state and test changes on Home in seconds.
✅ More realistic QA: Bugs show up where they actually happen - after authentication.
✅ Less context switching: I don’t have to stub screens or bypass flows to try features.
Conclusion
With the Home route established, the scaffold set, and the navigation flow locked, the post-auth foundation is in place. Now I can focus on turning that empty canvas into a motivating, data-driven hub. Once I'm confident in the basics, I’ll spice things up with interactive elements to enhance user engagement. Stay tuned for more updates as I continue to build and refine new features!