Jetpack Compose 1.8 Announced With Many New Features Like Autofill, Text Improvements, Visibility Tracking, and More
The California-based tech maker – Google has now announced a new version of its Android native UI toolkit – Jetpack Compose. The newly-announced Jetpack Compose version 1.8 comes with many new features which include autofill, text improvements, visibility tracking, and more.
Read more about the latest Jetpack Compose 1.8 below.
Jetpack Compose 1.8 – Now Announced
A new version of Android’s modern and native UI toolkit that is being used by many developers – Jetpack Compose 1.8 is now available, and it has been released as part of the Compose April ’25 Bill of Materials. As mentioned, features such as autofill, text improvements, visibility tracking, and new animate ways for composable size and location are included. Also, many experimental APIs have been made stable and a number of bugs are fixed. In order to make use of the new release, users or developers will have to upgrade the Compose BOM version to ‘2025.04.01’ (or upgrade Compose Foundation and Compose UI).
Speaking more, autofill which simplifies data entry can be integrated onto Compose Applications. For this, set the contentType Semantics and handle saving credentials for both new or updated information. In BasicText, autoSize parameter can be used when placing a text inside a container, and it will let the text automatically adapt to the container size. Sizing can be customized as well by setting a minimum and maximum font size and by defining a step size. This new BasicText overload is present in Compose Foundation 1.8, while an updated Text overload will be arriving soon with Material 1.4.
Also, with the TextOverflow.StartEllipsis or TextOverflow.MiddleEllipsis new options, text overflow handling has also been enhanced by Compose 1.8, allowing developers to display ellipsis either at the beginning or at the middle of a text line. With bulleted lists, HTML formatting support has also been expanded in AnnotatedString.
A new modifier – onLayRectChanged has also been introduced in Compose UI 1.8 and this solves multiple use cases that onGloballyPositioned does – with much less overhead. The LookaheadScope in 1.8 Animation module is now stable. Along with performance and stability improvements, a new animateBounds modifier has also been included.
The experimental APIs from 172 in the 1.7 release to 70 in the 1.8 release have been made stable. ContextualFlowRow and ContextualFlowColumn APIs as well as related FlowRow and FlowColumn APIs are stable now. Accessibility checks in tests, make dialogues go edge to edge, easier testing of ClickableText, and allowing customizing overscroll are the other improvements and bug fixes.
