Google Announced Stable Version of Jetpack Compose

Vaibhav Kadam
3 min readJul 31, 2021

Hola! Jetpack Compose 1.0 is now here, Google released the stable version of jetpack compose in the new version of Android Studio Atric Fox with awesome features like Layout Inspector and much more.

Photo by Farzad Nazifi on Unsplash

As per Google, compose is there in the community for the last 2 years but it was in beta version. Since the last two years, Google improves compose with open feedback and participation from the android community. As long as google announces Jetpack Compose 1.0 there are 2000 apps on the play store that uses jetpack compose and even the play store app itself uses compose. As app state changes, your UI automatically updates, making it a lot simpler to build UI quickly. Intuitive Kotlin APIs help you build beautiful apps with way less code and native access to all existing Android code means you can adopt at your own pace.

What is Jetpack Compose?

Jetpack Compose is Android’s modern toolkit for building native UI. It simplifies and accelerates modern UI development in Android. Using jetpack compose we can build awesome UI with less code and in a more efficient way as compared to the current view building (XML) approach. That means for creating a user interface in native android we need to use jetpack compose instead of XML. As code is Jetpack compose is more reusable and more functional as compared to the current view building approach.

The most important and architectural feature is that jetpack compose uses Declarative syntax for UI development. As Declarative UI Development is way more structured than old methods the result that we get through the user interface is great.

What is Declarative UI development?

Jetpack Compose is built upon a different programming paradigm. It uses a declarative paradigm. To put it shortly, it means that you have to change your way of thinking from: “How to do something” to “What goal I want to achieve”. In a declarative way of programming, you try to describe an expected result instead of describing every step to achieve the goal.

Or else we can say that the code (syntax) of Jetpack Compose describes what the UI should present — not how UI elements should be constructed. The how part is left to the runtime Jetpack Compose library to work out.

Key Features of Jetpack Compose:

  • Interoperable: Compose is built to interoperate with your existing app. You can embed compose UIs within Views or Views within Compose. You can add as little as a single button to a screen, or keep that custom view you’ve created in a now Compose screen.
  • Jetpack Integration: Compose is built to integrate with the Jetpack libraries you already know and love. With integration with Navigation, Paging, LiveData (or Flow/RxJava), ViewModel and Hilt, Compose works with your existing architecture.
  • Material: Compose offers an implementation of Material Design components and themes, making it easy to build beautiful apps that reflect your brand. The Material theming system is easier to understand and trace, without having to consult multiple XML files.
  • Lists: Compose’s Lazy components offer a simple, succinct but powerful way to efficiently display lists of data, with minimal boilerplate.
  • Animation: Compose’s simple and coherent animation APIs make it far easier to delight your app’s users.

Important points of Jetpack Compose:

  • Compose is clearly articulated as the future of native Android, and is certain to be the target for future platform SDK efforts
  • Compose uses Kotlin! that means we need to use Kotlin for creating user interfaces with the help of compose.
  • Like other Jetpack components, Compose has excellent backward compatibility with older Android OS levels even users with older Android devices can run applications built with Jetpack Compose UI.
  • As compose uses the Declarative UI approach, Declarative UI creates immutable UI objects, eliminating the need for programmers to write code that keeps UI components and underlying controller code in sync.

Happy Composing!

Now, that compose is stable at 1.0 it’s time to get started. To help you to learn to compose google has a comprehensive set of resources. Like a pathway course that will teach you everything, you need to know about compose, extensive documentation, and a full set of sample apps.

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Vaibhav Kadam

FullStack Android Developer | Mobile Development Enthusiast | Struggling CS Student | Thoughts and Experience from student’s Perspective