Exploring Ktor: An Alternative To Retrofit For HTTP Requests In Android

A Guide Through Integrating The Ktor Client Into Your Native Android Project

Although Ktor has already won great popularity among developers for Kotlin Multiplatform Projects, the leading framework used for processing HTTP requests is still Retrofit.

However, looking at alternative solutions to your current tech stack never hurts. So in this article, we will look at how to set up the Ktor client in your native Android project, handle HTTP requests and finally discuss whether you should use Ktor over Retrofit for your current native Android project.

1 Gradle Setup

To be able to properly configure and use our Ktor client, we first need to enrich our Gradle configuration with a few dependencies.

1.1 Client dependency

The first thing we need to do is to add the dependency for the Ktor Client Android engine.

dependencies {
    implementation "io.ktor:ktor-client-android:2.2.3"
}

1.2 Logging

The Logging plugin allows us to log our HTTP calls. To be later able to add it to our configuration, add the following to your project-level build.gradle file: