Connect with us

Articles

Play Time with Jetpack Compose

Learn about Google Play Store’s strategy for adopting Jetpack Compose, how they overcame specific performance challenges, and improved developer productivity and happiness.

In 2020, Google Play Store engineering leadership made the big decision to revamp its entire storefront tech stack. The existing code was 10+ years old and had incurred tremendous tech debt over countless Android platform releases and feature updates. We needed new frameworks that would scale to the hundreds of engineers working on the product while not negatively impacting developer productivityuser experience, or the performance of the store itself.

We laid out a multi-year roadmap to update everything in the store from the network layer all the way to the pixel rendering. As part of this we also wanted to adopt a modern, declarative UI framework that would satisfy our product goals around interactivity and user delight. After analyzing the landscape of options, we made the bold (at the time) decision to commit to Jetpack Compose, which was still in pre-Alpha.

Since that time, the Google Play Store and Jetpack Compose teams at Google have worked extremely closely together to release and polish a version of Jetpack Compose that meets our specific needs. In this article we’ll cover our approach to migration as well as the challenges and benefits we found along the way, to share some insight into what adopting Compose can be like for an app with many contributors.

Advertisement

Trending