Introduction to Jetpack Compose: The Future UI Toolkit for Android

Say goodbye to XML layouts and adopt the modern techniques

Photo by Benjamin Sow on Unsplash.

The traditional and common way of building UI in Android is using XML-based layouts. Once a stable version of Jetpack Compose is released, however, it is going to be the old-fashioned way.

In this article, I will provide a basic overview of Jetpack Compose and how we can use it in place of XML layouts to build declarative UI.

What Is Jetpack Compose?

“Jetpack Compose is Android’s modern declarative UI toolkit for building native UI. It simplifies and accelerates UI development on Android. Quickly bring your app to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.” — Android Developers

In simple terms, Jetpack Compose is a simple framework or collection of components or tools that help us to build great apps in less time in Android. Jetpack Compose makes UI development easier with less boilerplate code and the synchronization of UI state with data changes. We can say Jetpack Compose is a UI-building framework that replaces the approach of XML-based UI development. It makes developing UI faster and easier.