Google released its new UI toolkit Jetpack Compose, designed to make it easier to build native apps across all Android platforms.
According to the team, Compose offers modern, declarative Kotlin APIs and is built to integrate with existing Android apps and Jetpack libraries.
Google’s product manager Anna-Chiara Bellini and developer relations team member Nick Butcher explained that the beta release of Compose API currently has all the features necessary to build production-ready apps and that the release is API stable.
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For the beta release, Android has been primarily focusing on ensuring that all the foundational APIs are ready for the 1.0 release. Other new features since the alpha release include coroutines support, accessibility support for Talkback, easy-to-use animations, material UI components and more.
“Built entirely in Kotlin, Compose takes advantage of its great language features to offer powerful, succinct, intuitive APIs. Coroutines for example enable us to write much simpler async APIs such as describing gestures, animation or scrolling. This makes it easier to write code that combines async events, like a gesture which hands off to an animation, all with cancellation and clean-up provided by structured concurrency,” Bellini and Butcher wrote in a blog post.
Compose Beta is supported by the latest Canary of Android Studio Arctic Fox, which includes Live Literals for real-time updates of literals in preview and Compose support in the Layout Inspector.
Users also have access to Interactive, Animation and Deploy Previews.
In addition, the company laid out a number of adoption strategies outlined here that allow developers to adopt it at their own pace.
Lastly, the team released new and updated documentation guides, a number of screencasts and a new Animation Codelab to help developers dive deeper into how to build with Compose.
