Jetpack Compose 1.2 Beta Released with New Features, Layout Improvements, and Performance Tools

Community Adoption of Compose

One year after the release of Jetpack Compose 1.0, many companies such as the Play Store team, Twitter, and Airbnb have adopted Compose for large‑scale production apps, reporting increased developer productivity and more enjoyable UI development.

Play Store: "All new Play Store features are built on this framework, and Compose helps unlock faster releases."

Twitter: "Compose makes it easier to define our own components with clearer, more flexible APIs."

Airbnb: "Jetpack Compose is a key part of our tech strategy, delivering huge productivity gains."

Over 100 of the top 1,000 Play Store apps now use Compose.

Focus on Advanced Use Cases

The team is concentrating on new APIs, tools, and easier ways to build with Compose, and will publish more guidance, talks, codelabs, and videos to help developers transition to this declarative UI paradigm.

Compose 1.2 Beta

The first beta of Compose 1.2 brings a host of features and improvements.

Text Improvements

Font Padding: The most‑voted issue is addressed with the includeFontPadding parameter; setting it to false allows more precise text alignment. Future releases will make false the default, and developers can adjust line height with lineHeightStyle .

Text(
    text = myText,
    style = TextStyle(
        lineHeight = 2.5.em,
        platformStyle = PlatformTextStyle(
            includeFontPadding = false
        ),
        lineHeightStyle = LineHeightStyle(
            alignment = Alignment.Center,
            trim = Trim.None
        )
    )
)

Downloadable Fonts: New APIs let developers asynchronously fetch Google Fonts and provide fallbacks without complex setup, reducing APK size and improving runtime performance.

Text Magnifier: Compose now supports the Android text magnifier for easier text selection, with enhanced behavior matching the platform view implementation.

Layout Features and Improvements

Lazy Layouts: The experimental LazyVerticalGrid and LazyHorizontalGrid APIs graduate from experimental status, and a new experimental LazyLayout API enables custom lazy layouts.

CoordinatorLayout Interop: Developers can now embed composable scrolling inside a CoordinatorLayout and ensure interoperable scroll behavior using rememberNestedScrollInteropConnection with the nestedScroll modifier.

Window Insets: The Accompanist insets library has been migrated to the Compose Foundation library, exposing a WindowInsets object for seamless integration with existing UI.

Window Size Class: A new set of viewport breakpoints is provided via the material3-window-size-class alpha library, helping developers design, develop, and test resizable layouts across different screen sizes.

Performance Focus

New performance tools and guidelines help developers identify and fix bottlenecks. Android Studio Dolphin adds a Layout Inspector that shows recomposition counts, and Android Studio Electric Eel introduces a recomposition highlighter to visualize when composables recompose.

The newly released compose‑performance guide explains best‑practice configurations for optimal Compose performance, and the I/O talk highlighted common performance pitfalls and lazy‑layout issues.

"Performance is an area of continuous focus; we appreciate feedback and encourage reporting issues or asking questions on KotlinLang Slack."

New Development Tools

Android Studio Dolphin (Beta) brings animation coordination, MultiPreview annotations for building across multiple screen sizes, and LiveEdit in the Electric Eel Canary for faster iteration.

Compose for Wear OS

Compose for Wear OS has entered Beta, offering a stable, complete API set so developers can start building Wear applications.

Improved Documentation

Several guides have been added or updated, including new workshops and codelabs on state management, basic layouts, performance, custom input, and a beginner-friendly Android fundamentals course with Compose.

Conclusion

The team hopes developers will explore these new capabilities; if you haven’t started with Jetpack Compose yet, now is the time to learn and adopt it.