Android Developers Backstage Episode 213: Compose runtime and performance
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Mar 4, 2025 Leland Richardson and Chuck Jasky, both key members of Google's Compose team, dive into performance optimization for the Compose toolkit. They discuss groundbreaking features like Pausable Composition, which automates updates and enhances rendering speed. The duo also tackles the challenges of managing mutable versus immutable objects and the intricacies of equality in Kotlin. Additionally, they touch on the balance between stability and performance, and highlight new diagnostic tools improving the developer experience in Android app development.
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Balance Performance Focus
- Over-focusing on stability and skipping can distract from other important performance aspects.
- Balance your attention between minimizing recompositions and optimizing expensive layout or drawing operations.
Initial Composition Bottleneck
- Main Compose performance bottleneck is creating new content, not updating existing content.
- Recomposition cost is usually smaller; initial composition impacts jank more.
Prefetching Limitations and Plans
- Current prefetching only preloads one item beyond viewport per frame, limiting fast scrolling.
- Future plans include smarter scheduling and prefetching multiple items in scroll direction to improve smoothness.