Google’s transition of Android UI development from the XML layout system to Jetpack Compose has been, by the standards of platform UI framework migrations, unusually smooth. Compose became stable in August 2021. By 2024, it was the recommended approach for new Android development. In 2026, the question for Android teams is no longer whether to adopt Compose but how to manage the migration of existing View-based codebases.

The comparison with SwiftUI is instructive. Both frameworks launched within two years of each other, both represent declarative replacements for older imperative UI systems, and both have faced criticism for gaps between their initial capabilities and the full feature set of what they replaced. Compose has navigated this transition with fewer of the minimum-API-level constraints that limit SwiftUI’s adoption curve, because Android’s broader device compatibility requirements have historically pushed Google toward more conservative backward compatibility policies.

The question of whether to build natively for iOS and Android or to abstract across both platforms with a cross-platform framework has occupied mobile development teams for more than a decade. The answer has not settled. What has settled is the character of native development itself — and in 2026, Swift and Kotlin have each reached a maturity that makes the native argument significantly stronger than it was five years ago.