Celebrating 5 years of Jetpack Compose

0. 11 release , we’ve seen the APIs evolve significantly over the years, and we’re taking a moment to celebrate. 0 release, we promised a simpler, faster, and more intuitive way to build native interfaces on Android.

Looking back, it's safe to say that Compose didn’t just deliver on that promise, but also completely changed the Android ecosystem, with more than 68% of the top 1,000 apps using it in production today. History Over the last five years, Compose has grown steadily. In the early days , we explored showing you how to build layouts with the basic Box, Row, and Column.

Today, we’ve expanded Compose to work not just on mobile devices, but to other form factors such as Compose for TV , WearOS , Glance for Widgets , and even display glasses with Jetpack Compose Glimmer . We recorded an Android Developers Backstage episode with Clara Bayarri , Engineering Lead for Jetpack, and two former leads of the team, Romain Guy and Chet Haase , along with Tor Norbye , Senior Engineering Director. In this episode, they discuss the history of Compose and the early days of development.

Compose highlights over the years Looking back The beginnings of Compose were very different from what you know today. Two projects were happening in parallel inside the Android team. At the time, the Views toolkit team was thinking of unbundling the UI Toolkit into a library to help with development speed, and make it easier for developers to adopt and control updates.

mainContent) } } } } } } And you, the community, helped us very early on! Before 2021, Compose had a pre-alpha phase, which helped ensure Compose was fit to solve the problems of our developers. One of our favorite memories is the Android Dev Challenge.

0 release. Compose has continued to evolve, from launching with a set of Material 2 components to now supporting Material 3 Expressive . 0, 5 years ago.

This year, we introduced more adaptive APIs, such as FlexBox , Grid , MediaQuery , and Styles . These APIs let you advance to the next level of premium, adaptive UI development with Compose. At Google I/O 2026, we announced that we are now Compose-first , meaning that all future UI development will happen only in Compose, while the Views toolkit enters maintenance mode.

Material Design is also shifting focus entirely to Compose, signaling an end to the findViewById era . Community is at the heart of Compose  Over the years, you’ve inspired us with creative examples of how you’ve used Compose, and we’d love to highlight a few more examples of where we’ve seen exciting work. JetBrains has been a great partner for Google with Compose, expanding Compose to work across platforms with Compose Multiplatform and enabling desktop, iOS, and web developers to also enjoy the benefits of Compose.

app’s Dispatch , AndroidWeekly , to jetc - helping Android Developers stay up-to-date with the latest in the world of Compose and Android. Another standout contributor is sinasamaki . seconds, ) } } } /** A path drawing the Android head.

*/ fun createAndroidHeadPath(bounds: Rect): Path = TODO() Jake Wharton , who has used Compose in innovative ways (like molecule , and even building UI with Compose for the terminal with mosaic ). Chris Banes , who has built many Compose libraries over the years, with our most recent favourite - Haze for background blurring, and many of the Android Google Developer Experts like Akshay Chordiya , Huyen Tue Dao , and Katie Barnett , who’ve contributed to the success of Compose. But this is not about selecting individuals - there have been so many great contributors to the Compose codebase, and many of you continue to inspire us with your fun examples, libraries, and in-depth talks.

Without the community, Jetpack Compose wouldn’t be as successful as it is today.   Jetpack Compose has grown from an experimental idea into the standard for Android UI Development. Thank you to the entire Toolkit team at Google, and to the incredible global developer community that wrote libraries, filed bugs, and pushed the boundaries of what declarative UI can do.

This week, we’ll be celebrating with some in-person birthday parties across the globe, and a live “Birthday party” on the Android Developers YouTube channel on July 30th at 13:00 UTC. During this time, we’ll hang out and discuss Compose and answer your questions! Cheers to the next 5 years, and happy composing!