Keynotes From #TheAndroidShow: Jetpack Compose

Hey Guys, as of today, Jetpack Compose is in Beta! Yes, you heard that right.

Now the Android Developers Team announced this with a YouTube livestream, #TheAndroidShow: Jetpack Compose! where most of the big questions on our minds were answered. So if you missed it or you were present but you still need a refresher, don’t worry, I’ve got you.

Just a heads-up, everything from the Q&A is summarised, but not to worry, you can still get the full resources which I will share at the end and if you know very little about it, you can start from here.

The live Q&A was hosted by Nick Butcher, Anna-Chiara Bellini, Leland Richardson, Clara Bayarri and Amanda Alexander. They answered questions on the following areas;

View Rendering Performance

• Compose performs favourably with views and the Jetpack Compose Team has been getting some good metrics during testing.
• Still requires a bit of work by the Jetpack Compose Team.
• Nothing major to worry about for now.

Integrating with Existing Codebase

• It is pretty easy.
• Depends on how much of your codebase you want to compose.

Compose Tooling

• The latest canary version of Android Studio has support for Jetpack Compose, this means you’ll be able to preview your composables in Android Studio without running a physical device or emulator.
• Jetpack Compose supports ConstraintLayout too but things are done much differently.

State Management

• The Jetpack Compose Team has no strong opinions on how to manage state this is because it was designed to work with any of the popular existing State Managements like MVI and redux. (They also advise you use what works best for you and your team.)

Tutorials

• A lot of tutorials will be made available for developers to use. Currently you can surf the Jepack Compose Pathway and also view several samples of Compose in action.

MotionLayout and Animations

• Animations in Compose is completely reworked. I highly recommend you check out the samples.
• Little progress has been made integrating MotionLayout, so for now I don’t think we can use it.

Production

• Compose is just in Beta, so using it in production is entirely your decision to make but you should be aware of the Trade-offs before rolling out.

Activities & Fragments

• They won’t be completely be replaced but we will have less interaction with them. This would be case for existing and new projects.

Lastly, Jetpack Compose is FUN!😄

Thank you all for reading. If this helpful to you, please share and show some love ❤️

As promised, the link to the full resource and everything you need to know about #TheAndroidShow: JetpackCompose