Android is now Compose First - Future of .NET Android & MAUI?

[cjrvdev]

Android framework version

Other

Affected platform version

ALL

Description

In the recent days Android has been declared Compose-first and therefore the old Views approach is being deprecated (maintenance mode, but read between lines...). As far as I know both .NET Android and MAUI are built upon Views system and has never been compatible with Jetpack Compose way of building screens.

What is the future of these technologies? Has Microsoft decided something regarding the future of develpment in C# or at some point whenever Google decides to fully remove these old APIs we will be left abandoned?

Please let us know the future ahead! Thanks!

Source: https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/first

Steps to Reproduce

Be a developer! 💃🏻

Did you find any workaround?

No response

Relevant log output

[gmck]

@cjrvdev
I'm very interested in your observations, especially your "but read between the lines" comment. I'm thinking along similar lines. I tried to start a similar conversation when I recently reported the "Preview 3 and Preview 4 can't create an Android 37 emulator" issue #11387. However, that is now closed, as it should be, so you can only view it by changing it to a “closed” issue. I can also see that you follow me on my GitHub page, but when I follow you back, I still can't see your email address. If you are interested in sharing your ideas, I'd appreciate being able to share future ideas, preferably by finding a suitable public forum to continue, as this obviously isn’t the right place. Please email me if you are interested. I’ve just modified my p4 repo to make my GoogleSignInFragment comply with the new API 37 rules, so I’m going to add it to one of my existing projects on my GitHub page to explain what is required.

[jonathanpeppers]

.NET MAUI already has a gradle project, they could just use Kotlin directly and provide a way to "opt into" compose views:

• https://github.com/dotnet/maui/tree/main/src/Core/AndroidNative

.NET MAUI developers could just keep using the same APIs and not even notice.

For non-MAUI developers, I was experimenting here:

• https://github.com/jonathanpeppers/compose-net

I do not have a nice "compose from C#" design yet but only worked on it a day or two so far.

[cjrvdev]

I see you personally have been diving into this the last couple of days, that is great. I was also curious if there was something useful to be done with the compose binding nuget besides using it to bind other libraries.

I know it might (and most likely is) sound crazy but wouldnt it be interesting for MAUI's future to somewhat change into something more compose-like like other frameworks like Flutter or KMP do? Seems like declarative programming is the modern way to go now and XAML will eventually be a limit if Google pulls the cable.

Anyway all of this is pretty much barebones at this time and there hasn't been enough time to discuss internally all of the pros and cons of all these changes. Still I'm thankful for your reply and will keep an eye on your repo from time to time to see how the experiment goes since at some point our project will need to make a decision about what to do with out app (is enormous and a big client so any migration or decision will take months to develop...)

Thanks a lot Jonathan!

[jonathanpeppers]

They moved Comet into dotnet/maui-labs as a thing that is what you are describing:

• https://github.com/dotnet/maui-labs/tree/main/src/Comet

I'm more focused on: "what is the new base View type for Android?" -- "what is the future of Android dev in C#?"

You might want to ask on dotnet/maui or dotnet/maui-labs about general design questions.