Recently I was trying to understand why Android actually needed Jetpack Compose, beyond just “XML replacement”.
Compose did NOT replace Android’s rendering system.
Skia, rendering pipeline, GPU acceleration, layout/draw phases still exist underneath.
What Compose really changed was:
how UI descriptions and updates are managed.
Traditional Android:
- mutate View objects manually
Compose:
- rerun UI functions from state
That realization suddenly made recomposition/runtime/compiler make much more sense to me.
I wrote down the architecture evolution here if anyone finds this topic interesting:
https://medium.com/@tarun00/why-android-needed-jetpack-compose-fb46e84b0002
u/Critical-Living-7404 — 21 hours ago