Optimize App Performance By Mastering Stability in Jetpack Compose

Jetpack Compose, Google's modern UI toolkit, has gained significant traction since its stable 1.0 release, with over 125,000 apps launched on the Google Play Store. Understanding how Jetpack Compose renders UI elements and optimizes performance is crucial for developers to enhance application performance and user experience. The rendering process involves three phases: Composition, Layout, and Drawing, followed by Recomposition when UI elements are modified. The stability of parameters in Composable functions, categorized as stable or unstable by the Compose compiler, plays a critical role in triggering recomposition. Smart recomposition uses this stability information to avoid unnecessary recompositions, thus improving performance. Developers can influence recomposition by using stability annotations such as @Stable and @Immutable, managing lambda expressions, and configuring file settings to treat certain classes as stable. For modular architectures, the compose-stable-marker library offers a lightweight alternative for stability annotations. The introduction of Strong Skipping Mode allows Composable functions to be skippable even with unstable parameters, enhancing performance by reducing unnecessary updates. Understanding these concepts is essential for optimizing applications built with Jetpack Compose.