Google releases Jetpack Compose Developer preview with Android Studio 4.0

News in Brief:

• Google in Android Dev Summit 2019 launched Android Studio 4.0 with Jetpack Compose.
• Both are available for download on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac, etc.

The Android Dev Summit which took place yesterday in Sunnyvale has really got developers excited. Google in this event, released Android Studio 4.0 Canary including, to everyone’s surprise, an early and fascinating developer preview of Jetpack Compose.

The company had released extended APIs for Android Jetpack and Jetpack Compose, with the new update for Android Studio which is the latest version of its IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

In Google I/O 2019, Google already announced that it had introduced 11 new libraries for Jetpack. Moreover, Android Product Manager, Stephanie Cuthbertson shared in the conference that almost 80% of the top 1000 applications in the Google Play Store are already using Jetpack. And yesterday, she updated this fact to 84% of the top 10,000 apps using Jetpack.

New Features of Android Jetpack

• Benchmarking is made available now as a release candidate, making it easier to measure the performance of the applications.
• Viewbinding has been added to the Android Jetpack. It facilitates access to the View from your code and is a type-safe solution rendering minimal build-time impact. It eliminates the need for annotation processors and findViewById().
• The CameraX is meant to simplify the development experience and let developers focus on the application by resolving the differences between many devices in the Android ecosystem. Devices such as Samsung, Oppo,  Xiaomi, Motorola, LG have already unified behind CameraX and will hit beta in December.

Although these all are just iterative updates while several bigger improvements are expected to hit the market in I/O 2020.

Android Studio and Jetpack Compose

The latest unbundled toolkit- Jetpack Compose is designed to simplify the UI development and accelerate Android app development, by blending a reactive programming model with the Kotlin language in a way that takes inspiration from Flutter. 

In fact, you can get it by downloading the latest Canary build of Android Studio.

The IDE for Android Studio 4.0 includes code completion, live previews, Java 8 library desugaring, motion editor, full support for KTS files, and Kotlin live templates and a sample app; all this has been rolled into the latest Android Studio Canary 4.0 release.

Cuthbertson also said that since Compose is getting developed entirely in AOSP, there is a continuous feedback loop that has led to numerous API improvements and that it will hit beta in 2020.

Both Android Studio 4.0 and Jetpack Compose support are available on Mac, Windows, Chrome OS, and Linux.