Thread by @MishaalRahman

Google highlighted some major improvements to Jetpack Compose at #GoogleIO 2023. Here’s a summary of some of the highlights:

In the latest alpha release, Google says they’re seeing an average 22% performance gain for Text and TextField after migrating modifiers to a new and more efficient system. To take advantage of this, update your Compose version.

Compose now also supports the latest emoji version and new text features like outlining text, hyphenation, and line breaking behavior configuration.

The new pager component lets you horizontally or vertically flip through content. medium.com/androiddevelop…

The new flow layouts FlowRow and FlowColumn make it easy to arrange content in a vertical or horizontal flow like lines of text in a paragraph. They also allow for dynamic sizing using weights to distribute the items across the container.

In Android Studio Hedgehog, the debugger will tell you exactly what parameters have “Changed” or have remained “Unchanged” so you can investigate the cause of the recomposition. Visual linting and accessibility checks for previews will help you audit your Compose UI.

Compose Material 3 version 1.1 stable adds new components like bottom sheets, date and time pickers, search bars, tooltips, and others.

A new Compose library lets you observe the device’s window size class so you can easily build adaptive UI.

When attaching a mouse to an Android device, Compose will change the mouse cursor to a caret when you hover the cursor over text fields or selectable text.

First beta version of Jetpack Glance is available. The Glance library lets you create widgets optimized for phone, tablet, and foldable homescreens using Compose.

Compose for Wear OS 1.2 is in alpha, bringing improvements to placeholder & placeholderShimmer, expandableItems, and Horologist. Further, Android Studio now lets you preview multiple watch screen and text sizes while building a Compose app.

Compose for TV is now in alpha, bringing the benefits of Jetpack Compose to Android TV app development. Compose for TV comes with components like ImmersiveList and Carousel that are optimized for the living room experience.