Jetpack Compose Celebrates Five Years: How Google’s Declarative UI Framework Changed Android Development Forever

Today marks a major milestone for the Android developer community as Google officially celebrates the fifth anniversary of Jetpack Compose 1.0. First announced on July 28, 2021, the toolkit promised a simpler, faster, and much more intuitive way to build native user interfaces on Android. Looking back across half a decade of rapid iteration, the framework has not only fulfilled that initial promise but has fundamentally transformed the entire Android ecosystem. Today, more than 68 percent of the top 1,000 apps on Google Play utilize Jetpack Compose in production, making it the undisputed cornerstone of modern mobile development.

To commemorate the half-decade anniversary, the Android team at Google has released a special retrospective featuring Developer Relations Engineer Rebecca Franks, Product Manager Nick Butcher, and Product Marketing Manager Loryn Hairston. Alongside the written celebration, the team published a special episode of Android Developers Backstage. In this episode, Engineering Lead for Jetpack Clara Bayarri, former team leads Romain Guy and Chet Haase, and Senior Engineering Director Tor Norbye sit down to discuss the rich history of Compose, reminisce about its early days of development, and explore how an experimental idea blossomed into an industry-standard framework.

Looking Back at the Origins of Compose

The path to Jetpack Compose 1.0 was anything but straightforward. In the earliest days, two distinct projects were running in parallel within Google’s Android team, each tackling the persistent challenges of mobile UI design from a different angle. At the time, the traditional Views toolkit team was exploring ways to unbundle the classic UI toolkit into an independent library. The goal was to accelerate development speed and make it significantly easier for developers to adopt updates and maintain control over their applications.

Concurrently, another group of engineers was working on a novel concept: building declarative layouts by embedding XML directly inside Kotlin code. Eventually, those two parallel efforts merged, paving the way for the fully declarative UI toolkit developers rely on today. This modern architecture harnesses the combined power of a specialized compiler plugin, a dedicated runtime, and the expressive capabilities of the Kotlin language.

Before reaching the stable 1.0 milestone in 2021, Compose went through a rigorous pre-alpha and beta phase. This period was crucial for gathering developer feedback and ensuring the framework was robust enough to solve real-world engineering problems. One of the most memorable community engagements from that era was the Android Dev Challenge, where developers were tasked with building four distinct applications using early versions of Compose. The community responded by flooding social feeds with custom puppy applications, digital clocks, and weather trackers. This outpouring of creativity provided the Android team with invaluable direct feedback that directly shaped the final design of the 1.0 release.

Over the last five years, Compose has expanded far beyond its original boundaries. While early tutorials focused on basic layout primitives like Box, Row, and Column on mobile phones, the framework has since grown to support a vast array of form factors. Developers can now build seamless experiences for television screens using Compose for TV, smartwatches via WearOS, home screen widgets with Glance for Widgets, and even augmented reality and display glasses through Jetpack Compose Glimmer. Furthermore, the visual style of the toolkit has matured significantly, evolving from its initial reliance on Material 2 components to fully supporting modern design systems such as Material 3 Expressive.

Looking Ahead to a Compose-First Future

As the framework reaches its fifth year, the Android team continues to push the boundaries of what is possible with declarative UI. Following the recent rollout of version 1.11, the ecosystem is preparing for the upcoming release of version 1.12. This year has also introduced a powerful suite of adaptive APIs—including FlexBox, Grid, MediaQuery, and advanced Styles—designed to help developers craft premium, responsive user interfaces that adapt effortlessly across diverse screen sizes and devices.

Perhaps the most monumental shift was announced at Google I/O, where the Android team officially declared that the ecosystem is now entirely Compose-first. Under this new paradigm, all future UI development will happen exclusively in Jetpack Compose, while the legacy Views toolkit enters maintenance mode. Alongside this transition, Material Design is shifting its primary focus entirely to Compose, effectively signaling the long-awaited end of the findViewById era that defined Android development for over a decade.

Community is at the Heart of Compose

From the very beginning, the success of Jetpack Compose has been deeply intertwined with its vibrant global community. Developers around the world have continuously pushed the framework to its limits, creating inventive libraries, educational resources, and mesmerizing visual effects that inspire others.

Strategic partnerships have also played a vital role in the framework’s expansion. JetBrains has worked closely with Google to bring Compose beyond Android through Compose Multiplatform, enabling developers to target desktop, iOS, and web platforms with the same declarative mindset. Meanwhile, community-driven newsletters such as JetpackCompose.app’s Dispatch, AndroidWeekly, and jetc.dev have remained essential resources for keeping developers informed about the latest ecosystem updates.

Individual contributors have likewise left an indelible mark on the ecosystem. Creators like sinasamaki have delighted the community with playful UI experiments, including custom ribbon modifiers and glitch animations. Open-source developers like Saket Narayan have introduced indispensable tools such as Telephoto—a library providing robust pan, zoom, and sub-sampling gestures for large images—and Touch Robot, which simplifies the testing of interaction animations. Other prominent figures, including Jake Wharton with his work on Molecule and Mosaic for terminal UIs, Chris Banes with his popular background blurring library Haze, and numerous Android Google Developer Experts, have all contributed significantly to the culture and capability of Compose.

Google acknowledges that Jetpack Compose would not be the thriving ecosystem it is today without the passion, creativity, and dedication of its users. Whether by writing open-source libraries, filing detailed bug reports, or sharing innovative UI examples, the global community has been instrumental in shaping the framework’s trajectory.

As celebrations get underway, Google is hosting in-person birthday parties across the globe alongside a live virtual birthday celebration broadcasted on the Android Developers YouTube channel. With five successful years behind it and a fully Compose-first future ahead, the Android toolkit team and the global developer community are ready to take on the next half-decade of building incredible applications.