What’s new in Jetpack Compose

In the last year, we’ve seen many companies developing with Compose at scale, implementing new features and migrating screens from views to Compose. For example, we talked to the engineers at Lyft, who told us that over 90% of their new feature code is written in Compose, and moving to Compose made their code much simpler and easier to maintain. They also shared “We rewrote the button component in our app using Compose. Before it required 800 lines of code across three files plus 17 different XML files, and it is now down to a single Kotlin file with 300 lines of code. This is a 60% reduction in the Kotlin code alone“. The team at Zepeto has also been implementing Compose across many features, and are enjoying the experience, as “Compose simplified our UI layer logic, making it easier to understand code written by my colleagues.”

It’s great to see how these teams experience faster development cycles, and also feel their UI code is more concise and readable. And they’re not the only ones. Since this year’s Google I/O, the number of top 1000 apps on Google Play using Compose has increased by 50%! To help your team follow in the footsteps of the teams at Lyft, Zepeto, and others, we published a guide on How to Adopt Compose for your Team. It outlines how and where to start, and shows the areas of development where Compose can bring huge added value.

Modifiers on overdrive

Behind the scenes, we’re always working on improving Compose performance. The October ‘22 release includes a major refactor of how Modifiers work under the hood. While you will not notice anything changing in the APIs, this refactor paves the way for greatly improving Modifier performance. Learn more about the rationale behind the changes, and what’s planned for the near future in the ADS talk Compose Modifiers deep dive.

Popup & Dialog elevation change

Accessibility is always a first-class citizen for Compose, and this release contains a behavior change that helps fix an Accessibility bug with Popups and Dialogs: their maximum elevation is decreased from 30dp to 8dp. Your app will be impacted only if it uses a custom dialog or popup implementation with an elevation higher than 8dp. The release notes contain more information about the change, including a way to override the new behavior as an interim solution (keep in mind that we always recommend using 8dp maximum when customizing popups or dialogs).

New features

To help you adopt Material 3 check out our new migration guide with clear guidance on how Material 2 concepts translate to Material 3. The default template in Android Studio Flamingo now uses Material 3, to get you up and running in no time. We’ve also updated many of our sample apps, tutorials, templates, and codelabs to use Material 3 so you can learn as you go!

New tools

Developing your app using Jetpack Compose is much easier with the new and improved tools around it. We’ve added tons of new features to Android Studio to improve your workflow and efficiency:

Android Studio Dolphin is the latest stable release, bringing you:

• Animation Coordination
• Multipreview annotations
• Recomposition counts in Layout Inspector

Android Studio Electric Eel contains beta features, like:

• Live Edit (experimental)
• Composition rendering highlighting
• Configuring Preview devices
• Live updates in Previews

Android Studio Flamingo contains canary features such as:

• New project templates use Compose and Material 3 by default
• Live Edit turned on by default
• Improved composition tracing to help you better inspect performance issues.

Relay

Today we also launch the first alpha version of Relay, a design-to-code solution for improving designer-developer collaboration. Designers create UI components using the Figma plugin, and developers use the Android Studio plugin to automatically use these components in their apps. The generated components are composable functions and can be integrated directly into your Compose app. Learn more about Relay in the documentation.

Compose on Wear OS and Large Screens

In July we released the first Stable version of Compose for Wear OS, ready to build production apps. Compose for Wear OS is our recommended approach for building UIs for Wear OS apps. We’ve included over twenty Compose UI components that were designed specifically for Wearables, like TimeText, PositionIndicator, and ScalingLazyColumn.

We’re also continuing to make it easier to design, develop, and test apps for large screens such as foldables, tablets, and Chrome OS. The material3-window-size-class library graduated to Stable, giving you a set of opinionated viewport breakpoints to work with. Large screen designs often contain staggered grids, and the addition of LazyHorizontalStaggeredGrid and LazyVerticalStaggeredGrid will help implement these.

Feedback from the Android community always moves us forward. With your input we have updated our roadmap, focusing on areas that will help you implement Compose successfully. We’re now focusing on supporting more advanced use cases, covering more Material 3 components, improving platform support, tooling and performance.

New and updated guidance

No matter where you are in your learning journey, we’ve got you covered! We added and revamped a lot of the guidance on Compose:

• For hands-on work, head on to the revamped Compose for Android Developers course. It covers a wide range of topics, from basics to advanced.
• If you prefer watching videos, check out the MAD Skills: Compose Basics series and of course, all the Compose talks at the Android Dev Summit
• Read the expanded documentation on Images and Graphics.
• Wondering what animation to use? The new animation cheat sheet has the answer!
• Learn how to find and fix performance issues with the new debugging recomposition screencast and blog post.
• If you’re considering adopting Compose to your existing app, read the expanded Adopting Compose in your app guide.

 

Compose Camp

Running from September through December is a world-wide community-organized event series called Compose Camp! With both a beginner and an experienced track, developers of all levels can join Compose Camp to learn together with others. We already see lots of traction, with many videos being posted by GDGs and GDSCs all over the globe, and many events hosted on our Community platform.

Happy Composing!

We hope that you’re as excited by these developments as we are! If you haven't started yet, it's time to learn Jetpack Compose and see how your team and development process can benefit from it. Get ready for improved velocity and developer productivity. Happy Composing!