The Kotlin SDK That Lives Inside Your App
Last March, a studio founder messaged us at 11 p.m. on a Sunday. His users had voted on a feature request 400 times across three of his apps, but half of them never saw the notification when it shipped. The reason was simple: they'd voted on a web form, not inside the app itself. We realised we'd built something that solved this problem from the ground up. Most feedback tools ask users to leave your app. We asked why.
What 'Native' Actually Means When Everyone Claims It
The Kotlin SDK isn't a wrapped web view or a redirect to a mobile-friendly form. It's a real Android library you pull into your gradle file and build against. When a user taps the feedback button in your app, they vote without ever leaving. The UI respects your app's design system. The transitions feel native because they are native.
We spent months getting this right because we knew the alternative. We'd all used tools that throw you to a browser. The friction kills engagement. Your users drop off. Your voting becomes a popularity contest for the 2 percent patient enough to jump through hoops.
With Kotlin, you import com.mrvl.shpd and you're ready. Your users see a voting board that feels like part of your app. They tap, they vote, and they stay inside the experience you built.
Cross-App Voter Identity Changes the Math
Here's where it gets interesting for studios with multiple apps. Most feedback platforms treat each app as an island. A user votes in App A and App B, but the system has no idea it's the same person. You lose the signal. You build overlapping features. You send duplicate notifications.
Shpd includes Passport, a cross-app voter identity system. One person, one voter profile, across your entire portfolio. If they vote on a feature in your photo editor, we know they also use your social app. When the feature ships in either app, they get one notification, not two. You see that this voter cares about performance features, or workflows, or social features, across your products.
The Kotlin SDK handles Passport automatically. You set an identifier (usually the user's account ID in your backend), and voting identity is sorted. No extra infrastructure. No token juggling. We handle it.
Push Notifications at the Moment of Ship
That Sunday night founder had a real problem. His users couldn't celebrate wins because they'd left the feedback channel. They were back in their lives, using other apps, reading other feeds. The moment a feature shipped, they had no way to know.
The Kotlin SDK includes deep-link handling for push notifications. When a feature a voter supported launches, they get a notification. They tap it, and they're inside your app, viewing the feature they asked for. This closes the loop in a way web forms never can.
You don't have to manage the push infrastructure yourself. Shpd handles notification delivery. You set up Stripe billing and point your Kotlin integration at our API. Voters get notified at ship time. It feels like your app is thanking them for being part of the process.
The Public Roadmap That Works for Multiple Apps
One studio we worked with manages eight iOS and Android apps. They were using a spreadsheet to track features requested across all of them. No centre of gravity. No way for users to see what was planned. No sense of momentum.
The Kotlin SDK feeds into Shpd's public voting board, which you can brand or leave white-label. Features get SEO-indexed pages. Voters can comment, sort by status, and track progress. You can publish a roadmap for each app, or show a unified roadmap across your portfolio. The choice is yours.
What matters is that your users see the feature they voted on. They watch it move from Proposed to In Progress to Shipped. They see other people voted for it too. You're building a community around your products, not a feedback black hole.
Why This Matters If You're Coming From Canny
We won't pretend Canny is a bad product. It isn't. But in December 2025, their pricing changed, and a lot of studios realised they were paying per seat, per month, with no way out. A studio with five apps and a feedback team of three people was suddenly looking at £200 a month instead of £50.
Shpd is built differently. The Studio plan is £19 a month, flat rate, for up to five apps with unlimited voters. The Kotlin SDK comes with it. You're not paying per team member. You're not paying per voter. You're paying for the platform.
And because the SDK is native, your users get a better experience. They vote inside your app. They get notified when features ship. You see real cross-app patterns in how people engage with your products. That data matters when you're deciding what to build next.
If you're building multiple apps and you're tired of feedback tools that live on the web, the question isn't whether you need a native SDK. It's why you haven't built one in yet.