Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Google Jetpack Compose Android UI toolkit now in beta

news
Feb 26, 20212 mins

Declarative UI toolkit is intended to ease the development of native applications across Android platforms.

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Credit: Thinkstock

Google’s Jetpack Compose toolkit for the Android mobile platform has moved to a beta stage of release.

The declarative UI toolkit is designed to speed up the process of building native apps across Android platforms. Declarative Kotlin APIs are featured for building responsive apps with less code

With the Jetpack Compose beta, the developers have focused on ensuring API completeness and that all foundational APIs are in place. Work will continue on stabilizing the APIs. The beta is supported by the latest Canary release of Android Studio Arctic Fox IDE.

Directions for getting started with Jetpack Compose can be found at developer.android.com. The version 1.0 production release is due later this year. Capabilities added since the alpha release, which arrived last summer, include:

  • Support for coroutines
  • Accessibility support for the TalkBack screen reader
  • A new API for Animation
  • Views interoperability
  • Material UI components
  • Input and gestures
  • Window management
  • DSL-based constraint layout

Jetpack Compose is designed to work seamlessly with Android Views and allow developers to adopt the new toolkit at their own pace. Integration with common libraries, such as ViewModel, is intended to help developers add Jetpack Compose to existing applications without the need to re-architect.

The Jetpack Compose toolkit is built in Kotlin. JetBrains, the developer of Kotlin, has built its own desktop UI framework for Kotlin, Jetpack Compose for Desktop, which is based on the Google Jetpack Compose toolkit.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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