Jetpack Compose is Google’s way of wanting Android developers to create user interfaces for apps in the future. Through its developer blog, the Mountain View company yesterday explained how it exploited this resource for rewriting the Play Store user interface, significantly reducing its code and improving performance.
Google decided to revamp the Play Store’s entire tech stack in 2020 as it had been in existence for over a decade and began committing to Jetpack Compose which reached its first stable release in July 2021.
Jetpack Compose greatly improves the performance of the Google Play Store interface
Thanks to the new Kotlin – based Android UI toolkit from Google and Jetbrain, writing the UI requires much less code, sometimes up to 50% less due to the declarative nature of the UI framework.
For example, the Play Store app list rating table went from about 350 lines of Java and 55 lines of XML to about 210 lines of Kotlin. Additionally, Jetpack Compose makes it easier to add animations and other motion features, such as the download/update ring around app icons.
In addition, with the implementation of basic profiles, the Google Play Store has seen a 40% reduction in the rendering time of the home page in search results, reducing the slowness of the user interface by 10-15%.
Google has been using Jetpack Compose for over a year to write the Play Store UI code, and all new features are based on this framework.