Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer

We launched Jetpack Compose over a year ago, and have been busy improving it ever since. We’ve added new features and invented powerful tools to make your experience developing Android UI as productive, intuitive and fun as possible. So, if you're starting a new app, it's time to write it with Compose! With Material Design 3 support, new Bill Of Materials, Compose WearOS Stable and Android TV (alpha), Compose Camp, and many other pieces of news… It's an exciting release!

Compose in the Community

Compose, October ‘22 release

Today we’re releasing a new stable version of Compose, with some exciting features and news.

First of all, we’ve heard from you how it can be daunting to track versions across different artifacts that might go on different release schedules, so we’re now publishing, together with every Stable release of any of the Compose artifacts, a Bill of Materials, or BOM, to make your life easier.

Our first BOM release, Compose October ‘22, brings support for Staggered Grids, drawing Text directly to Canvas, Pull to Refresh, as well as performance improvements and bug fixes.

Compose Bill of Materials

A BOM is a Maven module that declares a set of libraries with their versions. It will greatly simplify the way you define Compose library versions in your Gradle dependencies block, especially now that we moved the various Jetpack Compose libraries to independent versioning schemes. Instead of defining each version separately, which can become cumbersome and prone to errors when library versions start to differ, you now only need to define one BOM version and all Compose library versions will be extracted from that. We will publish a new version of the BOM every time a Compose artifact has a new stable release, so moving from stable release to stable release is going to be much simpler.

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

We added a lot of new functionality to Compose. Here are some highlights:

• Implement staggered grids using the new LazyHorizontalStaggeredGrid and LazyVerticalStaggeredGrid
• Draw text directly to Canvas using DrawScope.drawText
• You can add a variable font to your app and change its properties using the FontVariation object.
• Add a UrlAnnotation to your annotated string to improve Accessibility services interacting with the text.
• Add hyphenation to your text using the new LineBreak API.
• Swipe to refresh with the new pullRefresh modifier.
• Add snapping behavior to your lazy lists using SnapFlingBehavior.
• LookAheadLayout is a new type of layout that provides information about final measurement and placement of its children so you can decide on intermediate layouts.

Compose Material 3 stable

Today we also announce the first stable release of the Compose Material 3 library! You can build an app using Compose and theme it according to Material Design 3, our latest iteration of Material Design. Use Material Design 3 to further customize your app’s colors, typography and shapes to make your brand stand out! The library contains fresh and updated versions of many UI components, such as buttons, cards, checkboxes, switches, navigation bars, drawers, and many more, with support for others on its way. See a list of all the supported components in the documentation and learn more in this blog post.

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 WearOS, Large Screens and TV

In July we released the first Stable version of Wear Compose, 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!

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer

Today, we’re releasing version 1.2 of Jetpack Compose, Android's modern, native UI toolkit, continuing to build out our roadmap. This release contains new features like downloadable fonts, lazy grids, and improvements for tablets and Chrome OS with better focus, mouse, and input handling.

Compose is our recommended way to build new Android apps for phone, tablets and foldables. Today we also released Compose for Wear OS 1.0 - making Compose the best way to build a Wear OS app as well.

We continue to see developers like the Twitter engineering team ship faster using Compose:

“Compose increased our productivity dramatically. It’s much easier and faster to write a Composable function than to create a custom view, and it’s also made it much easier to fulfill our designers’ requirements.”

Compose 1.2 includes a number of updates for Compose on Phones, Tablets and Foldables - it contains new stable APIs graduated from being experimental, and supports newer versions of Kotlin. We've already updated our samples, codelabs, Accompanist library and MDC-Android Compose Theme Adapter to work with Compose 1.2.

Note: Updating the Compose Compiler library to 1.2 requires using Kotlin 1.7.0. From this point forward the Compiler releases will be decoupled from the releases of other Compose libraries. Read more about the rationale for this in our blog post on independent versioning of Jetpack Compose libraries.

New stable features and APIs

Several features and APIs were added as stable. Highlights include:

• The APIs LazyHorizontalGrid and LazyVerticalGrid let you place lists of items in a grid. These APIs already existed in Compose 1.1 but were marked as @Experimental.
• The WindowInsets class provides modifiers such as windowInsetsPadding, systemBarsPadding, and windowInsetsTopHeight to deal with the insets of the device. This class is heavily based on the Accompanist insets library, and replaces it as the preferred mechanism for Insets.
• Modifier.nestedScroll provides nested scroll interoperability with views. Here’s a sample demonstrating this new functionality. Learn more in the gestures documentation.
• Easing curves were added that help write beautiful animations efficiently. Read more about how to use them in our animation guidance.
• Mouse support was improved, by adding Modifier.pointerHoverIcon, PointerEventType.Scroll, and PointerEvent.scrollDelta.

New Experimental APIs

We’re continuing to bring new features to Compose. Here are a few highlights:

• Create your own custom efficient scrollable layouts with LazyLayout. Add custom overscroll effects to your scrollable container using Modifier.overscroll.
• Downloadable fonts using GoogleFont. Read the documentation to get started.
• Many text features were added, such as allowing customization of includeFontPadding and line heights (see Text documentation and blog post), Brush APIs (see blog post), and the addition of pluralStringResource.
• Improved test APIs. For example, the performKeyInput action mimics keyboard input in your tests. The new testTagsAsResourceId semantics property allows integration with UI Automator.

Try out the new APIs using @OptIn and give us feedback!

Fixed Bugs

We fixed a lot of issues raised by the community, most notably:

• Let animations follow the system defined “Animator duration scale”.
• ​​Allow disabling of scrolling of lazy layouts by adding userScrollEnabled parameter.
• Make the back button behavior in TextField identical to the behavior in EditText.

We’re grateful for all of the bug reports and feature requests submitted to our issue tracker - they help us to improve Compose and build the APIs you need. Do continue providing your feedback and help us make Compose better!

Wondering what’s next? Check out our updated roadmap to see the features we’re currently thinking about and working on, such as animations for lazy item additions and removals, flow layouts, text editing improvements and more!

Jetpack Compose continues to evolve with the features you’ve been asking for. We’ve been thrilled to see tens of thousands of apps using Jetpack Compose in production already, and many of you shared how it’s improved your app development. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build next!

Happy composing!

Posted by Jolanda Verhoef, Android Developer Relations Engineer, and Anna-Chiara Bellini, Android Toolkit UI Product Manager

 

It’s been almost a year since Jetpack Compose 1.0 was released, and during this time we've seen the community adopt it with enthusiasm. You’ve told us you’re appreciating the conciseness of the Kotlin syntax and the declarative approach that makes thinking about UI so much faster and easier.

Compose in the Community

We've seen many companies adopt Compose at scale for the newest and boldest features of their apps. For instance, we've worked closely with the Play Store team, who started experimenting with Compose in the very early days, and learned that not only is it more enjoyable, it is beneficial to their developer productivity. They told us that "All new Play Store features are built on top of this framework. Compose has been instrumental in unlocking better velocity and smoother landings for the app." The team at Twitter has been using Jetpack Compose across different parts of the app, and they are reaping the benefits, as "Compose makes it much easier to define our own components and to make their API contracts more explicit, flexible, and intuitive." The Airbnb team adopted Compose as well: "Jetpack Compose is a critical part of our technical strategy. The productivity gains are massive."

We're very glad to see that these teams, who have carefully evaluated Compose in large, complex production environments, are experiencing not just more fun and clarity in their UI development, but broader engineering benefits! And these are just a few examples, because over 100 of the top 1000 apps in the Play Store are now using Compose.

These close collaborations, and listening carefully to feedback from the broader Android community, are always at the heart of our development process and are key to advancing our roadmap. We're now focusing on supporting your more advanced use cases, with new APIs and feature improvements, all together with new tools to make building with Compose easier. We know that Compose fundamentally changes the way UI is built. To help you with the necessary mindset shift, we're publishing more guidance, talks and codelabs on advanced topics, and more in-depth videos so you can write apps that look great and perform great. Here's what is new:

Compose 1.2 beta

Today, we’re releasing the first beta version of Compose 1.2, which includes a lot of features and improvements.

Text improvements

Font Padding

We’ve addressed one of the top-voted bugs in our issue tracker by making includeFontPadding a customizable parameter. We recommend you set this value to false, as this will enable more precise alignment of text within layout. We aim to eventually make this the default value in a future release. Please let us know in the issue above if setting the value to false leads to issues with your app. Additionally, when includeFontPadding is set to false, you can adapt the line height of your Text composable by setting the lineHeightStyle parameter. Combined it can look like this:

Multi-line Text with includeFontPadding set to true (left, current default) vs false (right) and lineHeightStyle.

Text(
 text = myText,
 style = TextStyle(
   lineHeight = 2.5.em,
   platformStyle = PlatformTextStyle(
     includeFontPadding = false
   ),
   lineHeightStyle = LineHeightStyle(
     alignment = Alignment.Center,
     trim = Trim.None
   )
 )
)

Downloadable Fonts

Compose 1.2 also introduces downloadable fonts in Compose. You can use the new APIs for Compose to access Google Fonts asynchronously, even defining fallback fonts, without any complex setup. With downloadable fonts, you can keep your APK size small and improve your user’s system health as multiple apps can share the same font through a provider.

Text Magnifier

Android text provides a magnifier widget, which makes selecting text easier. Compose now supports the text magnifier.

The magnifier is shown when dragging a selection handle to help you see what’s under your finger. Compose 1.1.0 brought the magnifier to selection within text fields, and now Compose 1.2.0 supports magnifier in both text fields and SelectionContainer. The magnifier has also been enhanced to match the precise behavior of the Android magnifier in Views.

Layout features and improvements

Lazy Layouts

Lazy layouts continue to evolve, with the grid APIs LazyVerticalGrid and LazyHorizontalGrid graduating out of experimental, and a new experimental API being added, called LazyLayout, that lets you implement your own custom lazy layouts. Learn more about these APIs in the I/O talk Lazy layouts in Compose.

Interop with CoordinatorLayout

When you embed a scrolling composable in a CoordinatorLayout from the view system, you can now make sure their scroll behaviors are interoperable. This makes the setup of a collapsible toolbar much easier. You can opt-in to this behavior by passing the result of calling the new experimental rememberNestedScrollInteropConnection method into the nestedScroll modifier. Here’s a sample demonstrating this new functionality.

Window insets

The insets library in Accompanist has now graduated to the Compose Foundation library, using the WindowInsets class. Read more about it in our documentation on Integrating Compose with your existing UI.

Window size classes

To make it easier to design, develop and test resizable layouts, we’ve released window size classes - a set of opinionated viewport breakpoints. They are now available in alpha in a new library material3-window-size-class, as part of the Material 3 set of libraries. You can read more about size classes in the Supporting different screen sizes documentation and take a look at a sample implementation in Crane.

Focus on performance

To help you understand and improve your app’s performance, we focused a lot on new performance tooling and guidance. With this, it becomes much easier to understand why and where your app might be lagging.

Starting from Android Studio Dolphin, you can inspect how often composables recompose using the Layout Inspector. Unexpectedly high numbers of recomposition can point you to a composable that could be optimized. In addition, Android Studio Electric Eel now includes a recomposition highlighter, a visual aid to see which composables recompose when. Read more about this new tooling in the What’s new in Android Studio blog.

Layout Inspector showing recomposition count and recomposition highlighter.

Compose changes the way you write your UI at a fundamental level, so there are some best practices that you can adopt to make sure your app is performant. The newly released documentation page suggests how to write and configure your Compose app for best performance. In the I/O talk Common performance gotchas in Jetpack Compose, the Compose team describe common performance mistakes and how to fix them.

Performance is an ongoing area of focus and we’re working hard on improving and extending tooling and guidance. In the meantime, we’d really appreciate your feedback on the work we’ve done so far. Please raise your bugs in the issue tracker or ask your questions on the KotlinLang Slack group.

New tools

On top of improvements, there are also new tooling updates to help you use Compose more effectively. Android Studio Dolphin, now in Beta, brings exciting features for Compose development. Beyond recomposition counts, new tools include Animation Coordination so you can see and scrub through all your animations at once, and the MultiPreview annotation to help you build for multiple screen sizes. To enable you to iterate faster Android Studio Electric Eel (in Canary) brings LiveEdit.

Check out What's new in Android Development Tools for all the details, and make sure you share your feedback to help shape the tooling support you need for Compose.

Compose for Wear OS

If there is something better than Compose, it is more Compose! So we're very excited to see Compose for Wear OS moving to Beta! Following the same principle as any other Jetpack library, Beta means that it's feature complete and API stable, and you can start building your production-ready apps. Go ahead and watch the talk, and read the blog post!

New and improved guidance

We’ve added and revamped a lot of the guidance on Compose:

• New workshop and revamped codelab on State in Compose
• New workshop and revamped codelab on Basic layouts in Compose
• New performance documentation
• Updated documentation on Custom Input
• I/O talks Common performance gotchas in Jetpack Compose and Lazy layouts in Compose
• For those who are new to programming, the Android Basics with Compose course is now available

Happy Composing!

We hope that you find these new features as exciting as we do. If you haven't started yet, it's time to learn Jetpack Compose and see how it will fit in your team and development process, so that you can experience all the benefits of improved velocity and developer productivity. Happy Composing!