19 May 2026

Android UI Development is Compose First

Posted by Nick Butcher, Product Manager

In the almost-5-years since Jetpack Compose launched, we've invested in bringing you all the features, performance and tools that you need to build amazing UIs across the variety of Android devices. Compose helps you to build beautiful, adaptive UIs that meet the demands of modern UI design.

Rich feature set: With a powerful library of layouts, input, graphics, animation APIs, and the latest Material Design components, Compose empowers you to build anything.
Highly performant: Out of the box, Compose offers native performance, delivering a delightful experience to your users.
Adaptive: Compose offers the easiest way to build adaptive apps that work across the range of Android form factors.
Productive: With powerful tools like Previews and Live Edit and the full expressiveness of Kotlin, teams tell us that they move much faster when building with Jetpack Compose, reducing the time to market.

Compose has matured into the standard for Android UI development—we believe that all Android UI should be built with Compose; we call this going Compose First. From today, we'll provide all APIs, libraries, tools and guidance in Compose. We now consider the View components that Compose replaces (components in the android.widget package) to be in maintenance mode. We have no plans to deprecate or remove View components and will continue to support them with critical bug fixes, but they will receive no new features.

View-based Jetpack Libraries
The same goes for View based libraries like Fragments, RecyclerView or Viewpager — we consider them complete and will only publish critical bugfixes. For a complete list of libraries now in maintenance mode, see here.

Tools
Any new Android Studio UI tools will be built for Jetpack Compose only. Existing view-based tools (such as the Navigation Editor and Layout Editor) are now in maintenance mode and will not receive new features.

Guidance
Documentation, codelabs, and samples will focus on building UI with Jetpack Compose. You can still find Views-specific documentation linked from pages that contain generic and Compose information, where relevant.

Happy Composing

We recommend that you build all new features with Compose and convert existing features when you touch them to gain the many Compose benefits. Check out our XML to Compose migration skill to help you convert existing layouts to Compose.

To learn about the latest Compose release, check out What’s new in the Jetpack Compose April ‘26 release blog and the roadmap for what’s planned ahead.

Thank you for all of the feature-requests and feedback that have helped shape Compose to become our recommended UI toolkit. As always, if you have any more feedback, let us know. Happy composing!

Explore this announcement and all Google I/O 2026 updates on io.google.

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