Jetpack Compose Alpha is released

Jetpack Compose Alpha is released(android-developers.googleblog.com)

76 points by yrezgui 5 years ago | 27 comments

phreack 5 years ago |

As an Android dev, I'm confident this will become as popular as Kotlin did vs Java once it becomes stable.

The preview looks great, it feels like it will make a breeze out of building composable small views, which in turn will mean many small libraries will be released, and on goes the virtuous cycle.

As a fan of React and SwiftUI, I'm excited!

xfour 5 years ago |

I'm going to be that commenter. Given Google's history I want to mark this date so we can start the countdown clock.

jitl 5 years ago | |

Compose is very necessary to remain competitive in the mobile apps landscape. Google is also behind here by about a year, so I expect to see continued strong investment in this area.

coldtea 5 years ago | | |

Compose, and Flutter, and their regular SDK, ...

aboodman 5 years ago | |

This was my very first thought and I worked at Google for a decade. What an awful reputation.

ubertaco 5 years ago | |

If the framework is open-source, then I'd think it could be forked even if it gets killed.

The problem then would be if there are some changes in Android that are incompatible with the framework, rendering it no-longer-usable.

WoodenChair 5 years ago |

For those looking for a summary: this is a SwiftUI clone for Android. SwiftUI itself is heavily inspired by React and older Functional-Reactive-Programming frameworks.

skavi 5 years ago | |

To be fair, Google has had Flutter since well before SwiftUI was released.

RomainGuy 5 years ago | |

Jetpack Compose was announced before SwiftUI :)

nikivi 5 years ago |

How similar Jetpack Compose is to SwiftUI?

byzn7 5 years ago | |

They look and feel quite similar. Both use a declarative approach to UI development. I think there are fundamental changes under the hood, though. For example, SwiftUI uses structs(value types) to build views but Kotlin only has classes which are reference types.

refulgentis 5 years ago | |

extremely similar to Flutter, SwiftUI is a sort of more wonky FP-y approach and they have a lot of work to do to flesh out the API still, we'll know more then

butz 5 years ago |

I presume apps built with Jetpack Compose will be smaller than ones built with Flutter?

matt2000 5 years ago | |

I would guess so, although the size overhead for an optimized Flutter release build is now down around ~4MB, so not a determining factor for most use cases anyway.

XzAeRosho 5 years ago | |

I'm also curious about what will happen with Flutter in the long term.

I mean, Flutter is an SDK, and the other is an UI toolkit, but I don't see how Flutter UI will remain relevant, specially since Jetpack might take over.

Shooti 5 years ago | | |

They'll probably continue to co-exist: Flutter is a Declarative UI product by the Dart team, Jetpack Compose is a Declarative UI product by the Android org. Google has no problem having multiple competing products by different orgs unless one org manages to absorb the other.

Dart has survived this long so that doesn't seem on the cards.

roneythomas6 5 years ago | | |

But Flutter works on iOS, Android and now on web.

KptMarchewa 5 years ago | | |

It's one of the giant Google A/B tests.

jillesvangurp 5 years ago | | |

Flutter will stay relevant exactly as long as Google believes it is relevant. I'd say the jury is still out on it but IMHO things are looking increasingly like they don't have a winner on their hands in terms of developer adoption. I've yet to encounter a single Flutter app in the wild. I'm not aware of anything mainstream using it.

You can tell a lot by what Google is talking about and what they are not talking about or actively avoiding talking about. Right now they are not talking a lot about Flutter (and even less about Fuchsia). Given the timing, you'd expect them to be full on shipping Flutter everything with the upcoming Android. Not a thing. Not happening at all. What ever they are doing with it, eating their own dog food is not it this year.

They just unceremoniously killed Duo after it was long clear to world + dog that that was the only sensible thing to do after that clearly failed to bring in a lot of new users from more fashionable things like Skype, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Zoom, or Google's own Meets. Duo never came close to being in the same league. Same thing with Flutter. It's not happening and probably never will. It's a dead horse, they've flogged it for a while, it's not going anywhere. The next logical move is to shelf it.

Jetpack Compose on the other hand looks like it will be the main thing to do Android with this time next year. They are shooting for a release in 2021. 2021 Android will hit Beta probably in Spring. I'd say Jetpack Compse is well on track to release along with that around the same time.

I played with Jetpack Compose a few weeks ago; it's great. It might actually interest me in doing some proper mobile development. The old android SDKs with it's mess of XML, lots of java legacy, convoluted build tooling etc. is not very compelling to me. Jetpack compose does away with pretty much all of that. Good riddance.

jamil7 5 years ago |

I was just upgrading my side project from dev14 - dev17 I had no idea the alpha would be out so soon.

odiroot 5 years ago |

Name collision? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack

ljoshua 5 years ago | |

Or Automattic/WordPress's popular Jetpack plugin, which I thought this was for a moment. (Another Gutenberg-like interface, again?? ;) )

pizza 5 years ago | |

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetpack

iruoy 5 years ago | |

Jetpack is used for a lot of different things.

Just today i found out about an upcoming Laravel package called Laravel Jetpack.