A Deep Dive Into Jetpack Compose

Designing a Kotlin-first UI Kit

Jetpack Compose is a modern toolkit for building native Android UI. Jetpack Compose simplifies and accelerates UI development on Android with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs. — Android Developers

This article is not about how to use Jetpack Compose or its basics. It’s about some of the insights of how and why it is being developed.

If you want to know the basics and how to use Jetpack Compose, read my latest article on how to use the developer preview of Jetpack Compose.

What Is the Need for a New UI Kit?

In Android, the UI toolkit goes way back in history, at least 10 years. Since then, things have changed a lot like the devices we use, expectations from users, and the expectations of the developers of the tools and languages they’re using.

Above is one of the reasons for the new UI toolkit, The other important reason is that the View.java class has so much code. Every component in the Android UI is extended from this class.