
Jetpack Compose Alpha is released - yrezgui
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/08/announcing-jetpack-compose-alpha.html
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phreack
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!

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

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jitl
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.

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

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WoodenChair
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.

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

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nikivi
How similar Jetpack Compose is to SwiftUI?

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byzn7
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.

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

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XzAeRosho
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.

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jillesvangurp
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.

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wstrange
According to [1], there are more than 90,000 Flutter apps on the play store,
growing at over 10,000 per month. Now to be fair many of these are low quality
throw away apps, but there some significant apps including Hamilton, and
Google Stadia.

In addition, flutter runs in a whole bunch of places, including native desktop
apps and of course Fuschia.

I am coming to the opposite conclusion. Flutter is a massive hit - and I think
Google is smart enough to know they have a a winner on their hands. Flutter
isn't going anywhere.

[1] [https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-
flutter-1-20-2aaf68c89...](https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-
flutter-1-20-2aaf68c89c75)

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jamil7
I was just upgrading my side project from dev14 - dev17 I had no idea the
alpha would be out so soon.

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odiroot
Name collision?
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Jetpack)

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iruoy
Jetpack is used for a lot of different things.

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

