Introduction to Jetpack Compose

Over the years, Android UI development has undergone significant transformations with various frameworks and libraries emerging to simplify the process.

Before Jetpack Compose, this is how we used to write UIs for our apps:

• Views were inflated from XML layout files. XML-based views are still supported alongside Jetpack Compose for backward compatibility and mixed use cases where apps have both XML layouts and Jetpack Compose.
• Themes, styles, and value resources were also defined in XML files.
• For us to be able to access the views from XML files, we used view binding or data binding.
• This method of writing a UI required huge effort, requiring more boilerplate code and being error prone.

Google developed Jetpack Compose as a modern declarative UI toolkit. It allows us to create UIs with less code. Layouts created in Jetpack Compose are responsive to different screen sizes and orientations. It is also easier and more productive...