My Compose App Was Showing the Wrong Theme After Restart — Here's the Fix

A user reported that the app kept resetting to light mode on every restart even though they'd set it to dark. The bug was embarrassingly simple: I was only updating a StateFlow . The ViewModel emitted the new theme, Compose recomposed, everything looked correct — until the process died. On the next cold start, the MutableStateFlow initialised with a hardcoded default and the persisted preference was never read. That's the most common Compose dark mode bug. This post covers the full production pa