Today, Google announced that its Jetpack Compose framework is now available in beta. Up until now, developers have been able to test it out in alpha via the canary version of Android Studio.
Jetpack Compose is a new toolkit for building out your UI. In fact, there"s already plenty of documentation for it. It"s something that developers have been testing out for a while, so one of the key things changing in beta is that APIs aren"t going to change between now and when it goes into production. It"s going to go into production later on this year around the time that Android 12 comes out, so you can get started on it now.
There are a bunch of new features that have been added since the first alpha release, such as coroutines support, accessibility support for Talkback, and a new Animations API. And on the Android Studio end of things, you"ll find new tools like Live Literals, Animation Preview, compose support in the Layout Inspector, interactive preview, and Deploy Preview.
Google also said that Jetpack Compose already works with your existing app, so you can start playing around with it whenever you"re ready. To get started, you"ll need the latest canary build of Android Studio Arctic Fox, which you can download here.