Android Development: The State of Compose in 2026
Looking back at the XML days of Android development feels like looking at black-and-white television. It worked, but boy, was it clunky. Today, in 2026, Jetpack Compose isn’t just “the new way”—it’s the only way that makes sense for modern Android apps. Declarative is King The shift from imperative (“find this view and set its text”) to declarative (“here is the state, describe how it looks”) has probably saved me thousands of hours of debugging weird UI states. No more null view references. No more findViewById. ...