Designing a Lightweight Flagged-Component Rollback Engine for Experimental UI in Live Android Applications

Authors: Varun Reddy

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37082/IJIRMPS.v14.i2.233070

Short DOI: https://doi.org/hb27sm

Country: United States

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Abstract: Continuous experimentation has become a foun-dational practice in modern Android application development, particularly for large-scale commerce and consumer-facing plat-forms where rapid iteration of user interface (UI) components is critical for optimizing engagement and conversion. Feature flags, remote configuration systems, and A/B testing frameworks enable teams to deploy experimental UI changes dynamically, reducing release cycles and accelerating product learning. However, these capabilities also introduce new operational risks: experimental UI components may cause functional defects, performance re-gressions, layout instability, or degraded user experience that are difficult to predict through pre-release testing alone.
Existing rollback mechanisms are typically coarse-grained, relying on disabling entire features, activating global kill switches, or issuing emergency application updates. These approaches are often slow, overly disruptive, and poorly suited for failures localized to specific UI components. This paper presents the design of a Lightweight Flagged-Component Rollback Engine (LFRE) for Android applications, enabling runtime, component-level rollback of experimental UI without requiring a full appli-cation update or interrupting unrelated user flows.
LFRE leverages feature flags, component isolation, lifecycle-aware state management, and safe recomposition strategies to enable rapid and targeted rollback. The framework is designed to operate entirely at the application layer and integrates with modern Android architectures including Jetpack Compose, ViewModel-based state management, and coroutine-driven exe-cution. Through architectural design and empirical evaluation, this paper demonstrates that LFRE significantly reduces the operational risk of live UI experimentation while introducing minimal runtime overhead.

Keywords: Android experimentation, feature flags, UI roll-back, Jetpack Compose, mobile systems resilience, runtime safety

Paper Id: 233070

Published On: 2026-04-05

Published In: Volume 14, Issue 2, March-April 2026

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