The demo that's worth a thousand decks
Hand someone the app and you'll save the meetings, the demos-of-the-demo, and the long email threads spent trying to describe the Atomic customer experience.
Eric Yuan
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A little while ago we launched Atomic Explore on iOS and made the case that a picture might be worth a thousand words, but a demo app you can actually hold is worth a million.
We’ve just launched the Android version, and it's now live on Google Play.
Here's why we bothered, and what's under the hood.
Why build a demo app at all?
In-app messaging is one of those things that's genuinely hard to explain and instantly obvious the moment you see and feel it. You can read that Atomic delivers secure, personalised messages inside the app your customers already use, but there is nothing like actually feeling a fraud alert, a term-deposit nudge, or a home-loan prompt arrive in a banking app, on your own phone, in your own hand.
Atomic Explore lets anyone in your team experience the customer-facing side of the Atomic.io platform in about two minutes, before a single meeting, decision, or line of code is written.
Meet Atomic Explore for Android
Atomic Explore on Android is a fully realistic and interactive banking app. Tap through onboarding, browse accounts, move money, explore transfers and payments, look at a home-loan flow, and watch in-app notifications land in a notification centre with live unread badges. It's the same experience as its iOS sibling, but rebuilt natively for Android.
Under the hood: three things Android teams tend to ask about
Here's the engineering picture.
1. Native app, native SDK, no WebView in sight
This is the one I care about most. Atomic Explore isn’t a web experience placed inside a native shell. The app itself is built natively in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, and the Atomic surfaces within it are rendered by Atomic’s native Jetpack Compose SDK. This replaces our legacy Android SDK, giving us and our customers a modern, native foundation built on Android’s recommended UI toolkit.
Horizontal streams, full feeds, single-card placements and modal experiences are integrated alongside the app’s own composables. There’s no WebView, JavaScript bridge or cross-platform wrapper pretending to be native.
The result is native Android rendering and interaction. Atomic themes can be configured to match your design system, while the SDK responds to system settings such as dark mode and font scaling.
That’s the difference between content that merely appears inside your app and content that feels like part of it.
2. A familiar, mainstream Android stack
There’s nothing exotic here, and that’s deliberate. Atomic Explore uses Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Material 3, Navigation Compose, screen-level ViewModels with StateFlow, Hilt for dependency injection and DataStore for local state. The Atomic SDK is added as a regular Maven dependency.
It’s a stack Android developers will recognise, using the same tools and patterns that modern Android teams already rely on.
That's the point. For teams already building with Compose, integrating Atomic feels like adding a library, not adopting a new UI model.
3. Real surfaces, not a toy
Demo apps have a habit of skipping the hard parts. This one leans into the integration seams that come up in real enterprise reviews:
Push notifications via Firebase Cloud Messaging: the same plumbing you'd wire up in production.
A live in-app notification centre with unread badge counts that update as messages arrive and clear.
Multiple Atomic placement patterns integrated into the app’s existing UI: horizontal streams, a full notification centre, a single-card bottom sheet and a full-screen modal overlay.
Meaningful customer journeys around those placements, including accounts, transfers and payments, home loans, insurance, payees and secure messages.
The banking data is demonstrative, but the Android integration is real. It's a demo you can genuinely poke at, not a scripted happy path.
Take it for a drive
If you're weighing up in-app messaging for a business where digital customer engagement is key, the fastest way to understand Atomic is to put it in your pocket:
Get Atomic Explore on Google Play →
And when you want to see the other half of the product (how those messages get targeted, personalised and orchestrated from the Workbench, without shipping an app update every time) then book a demo and we'll walk you through it.
See you in the app.
About the author
Eric Yuan
Senior Mobile Engineer
Eric is a senior mobile engineer at Atomic. He works across iOS, Android, and Flutter, collaborating closely with product and design teams to shape new features, solve complex technical problems, and review or write production code across Atomic’s mobile SDKs and applications.
