1 Year of Using Jetpack Compose - Is It Really That Good?

I'm now using Jetpack Compose for over a year and used it in differently sized projects. In this video I will share my experience with it, what's really good, what's not so good (yet) and what you should actually use it for.

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Here's the article that compares Compose and XML performance:

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[andikitta]

6 months with jetpack compose, love every second

[the_nomadic_ajith]

I am really loving that ever since i started using it❤❤❤.Our project has basic UI and has less importance on UI. So we already migrated to compose and i am happy about that. Git logs show that we have reduced approx 30% number of lines of code. We have not faced any bugs or issues yet. However there are a few things i didnt like about compose.

- Being functions you cannot directly extend properties
- I miss that alignParentBotton in xmls. Same thing in Compose requires you to wrap it with a Box component
- We have noticed that a lot of methods keep changing with each release of compose and needs code changes.
- Documentation about Scopes is not clear. ColumnScope, Rowscope etc. ( Maybe good if you can do a video on that)

But despite these short comings, compose is amazing and so much better than the age old xml files. ❤❤

[osisuper]

I have used Compose for solid projects and I have no regrets whatsoever. It’s my favourite over XML any time any day.

[nzanzuh]

Coming from React Native to Compose with zero native experiences was a great experience for me.
Compose helped utilize my experience with a declarative UI (React) framework and easily adapt to android development paradigm.

[jess_o]

I am loving Compose. I've had a feature utilizing it in production for about a year now, and the UI/Compose bit of that feature has been far and away the easiest, most enjoyable part of it. No more Binders, Adapters, ViewHolders, and all that other boilerplate nonsense!

[ubersticks]

Great video Philipp. With Compose it is fun and easy to create screens! However, it is also easy to create non-optimal code without realizing it. Things get confusing very fast with proper use of remember{}, derivedState{}, recognizing when to use "keys", recognizing and avoiding backwards writes, etc. To do things properly is unintuitive and much more challenging…

[tenseikenzx-]

After writing so many lines of XML and staring at many lines of it, transitioning over to Compose felt so good! You can very easily build reusable UI component faster with less code. Including nested XML layouts with it's own id requires me to write Kotlin code to factor that in. I'm looking forward to diving into Compose Multiplatform someday.

[coldwolf]

I started learning Compose for half a year now, but now it kinda slowed down, as some features are not in Compose yet. For now, i'm looking at Flutter. Will see how that goes, until back to Compose.

[eagleclaww]

The 2 biggest problems with Compose is navigation handling and not being able to pass the view model and have the preview working.

You need boilerplate code to handle navigation events and parse all the arguments, losing type safety, plus for strings you have to remember to URL encode and decode them since they can't contain special characters.

The top screen composables end up having 20 or more parameters since you need to pass every function, every state and every string that you want to display. This can easily cause bugs since you can't use named arguments for any of the functions.

SwiftUI don't have these issues and compose is newer than SwiftUI so it's strange they made these awful decisions.

But even with these issues Compose is still much better than XML.

[VenewebTV]

Excellent opinion, always updated on Android issues, and presenting the most objective view possible to help us, thanks and greetings from Caracas, Venezuela

[tonnie]

Nice Analysis and outlook into Compose. I can live without Staggered Grid, Animations and Scroll Bars, it is a small price to pay considering the robust nature of Compose. For Newbees I agree you should taste XML as the Industry is still leaning on XML. I agree with your prediction that compose will override XML at some point. Interesting insights on the speeds, let me have a look.

[BapeRuLLZ]

Good video. I think another thing that will slow the global switch to compose in the future is the fact that in my opinion ConstraintLayout is actually very good. If it wouldn't exist then companies would have far more motivation.

[Antiorganizer]

Compose blends with code far better than anything I've ever seen. It dynamically clues in what you do and adds and removes as needed automatically.

[XxdarkninoxX]

You don't seem to understand the metrics of the performance article very well. Compose didn't outperform XML at all in any case, it was still 1.5x slower on the best case.

[hamedhardani]

Hi Philipp
Please make a video for sharing a ViewModel between multiple composables with hilt. The Compose Destinations library has the feature but I couldn't make it work. I think many would need such tutorial

[Al-Balag]

Wish you all the best bro.I watch all your videos, very useful.
Please give a full video on PDF view for Kotlin multiplatform.

[diegoalarcon]

I'm using it in production but I've found some things that are still experimental, like the bottomsheet dialog, navigation transitions, etc.

[jianastrero]

Care to point the stackoverflow link where you came up with the idea of this video?

[renzcarlosalanga]

I am using pure jetpack compose with my current project. Will release it this year also

[alphacoder]

I work in one of Indias top startups and we are using compose in production.