Jetpack Compose

The most significant announcement made on the Android side was, without a doubt, Jetpack Compose. The initial impression I had was that it’s more or less a reactive DSL for creating UI, but it’s bigger than that. It’s actually Android UI reimagined.

It doesn’t use the current views like TextView and ImageView (although it can). Instead, it introduces new UI elements. I think this will be the biggest change on Android development ever. There were not any other fundamental changes announced other than Fragments. Architecture components are big, but they’re mostly wrappers around existing frameworks to make things easier. So I’m really excited about it (as you can probably tell). I hope this is the first step of a bigger change in the Android environment.

Jetpack Compose is at a very early stage—not even alpha yet. The Googlers I talked to think it’ll take some time to be production-ready and probably years to be adopted. Currently it’s released in AOSP as source code. If you want to try it you’d have to checkout a code that will provide a special version of Android Studio, required plugins, and the library itself (and build it). It’s only available for Linux and Mac OS for now.

You can find the information on how to get it running here:

Checking out and building the sample may sound scary, but it’s relatively easy to do and is also well-documented. If you want to talk about it or give feedback, there’s a #compose channel on Kotlin’s Slack. You can join Kotlin’s Slack group here if you’re not a member yet. If you want to learn more about it, this is the introductory video for Compose: