Most Retrofit tutorials show you isolated code snippets. This article traces the entire lifecycle of a Retrofit call — from app startup to data appearing on screen — using real code from a Pokedex app built with Kotlin, Hilt, Coroutines, and Jetpack Compose. By the end, you'll understand every link in the chain What Is Retrofit? Retrofit is a type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java. Instead of writing raw HTTP requests, you describe your API as a Kotlin interface , and Retrofit generates the