Early Access: new Jetpack Compose rewrite release (v6.0.0)

Hi folks! We've never posted anything on Patreon, sorry about that. If you don't care about the development journey, skip to the end for what v6.0.0 brings to you. APK is attached to this post.

Reminder: only you, patrons, can view this post and download the pre-release v6.0.0 APK. Please don't share it outside, as we will eventually release an Open Beta and allow everyone to test this new version. For now, however, it's meant only for you. Thank you for your support!

We've been hard at work at fully rewriting the app's code into Jetpack Compose, which is a new UI development toolkit for Android (although it can be used for other platforms too). When it launched all the way back in 2019, it promised faster, simplified development and tried to lure iOS & Web developers over to Android (its declarative style is similar to what they're already familiar with).

However, at the time it was rough, filled with performance issues, and came with a general uncertainty of what it could end up to be. It got its first "stable" 1.0 release in July 2021, two years after it was first announced, but it still wasn't "good enough". It had all the basic stuff a new developer might come to expect, but spend any more time with it and you'd quickly realise there's many things missing.

That's why we never fully committed to switching over to Jetpack Compose until this year (2023), even though we've been thinking about it constantly. I started development in March 2022, with the expectation that it would take a couple of months to finish everything up. I even showed interest in getting in more people outside Oxygen Updater to help with this refactoring. As it happens, those people either never worked with JC before, or weren't comfortable enough with it yet.

I quickly realised that even in 2022, JC was not mature enough for me to dedicate so much effort at that time. There were still crucial things missing, not to mention all the performance issues. Until the start of this year (2023), I mostly just fiddled around here and there, often dropping development for several months.

We touched upon this in our annual "Oxygen Updater in 2023" New Year's article. That was back in January, and it's September now. It wasn't the full 8 months that I worked on it, most of the work happened July onwards. Same reasons as before: JC is still a work-in-progress library in my opinion. Look at the long list of pending things in the official roadmap. Hell, even common things like swipe to refresh, scrollbars, and rich text are "in focus", i.e. not implemented as a first-party solution yet.

I had to write a lot of custom code to get things working to a reasonable degree. I'm happy with it, and I believe so is the rest of the team. With the background story out of the way, it's time to leave negativity out of this section. I'm genuinely happy with the opportunities JC provides, and how easy it makes adding new features or adjusting existing ones.

• v6.0.0 comes with excellent Material 3/You support, while keeping the general design language the same.
• The app — even its icon — now adapts to your device wallpaper on Android 12+, giving a homogenous feel with the rest of the system. Don't worry though, we've adjusted for older Android versions too.
• We've also revamped our install guides, making them much easier to navigate and understand.
  Though design changes are the most obvious ones, this is arguably the most important improvement we've made. Earlier, our guides were 4 pages arranged conceptually as "steps" that users had to swipe through. This wasted a lot of time, and since the content in these pages was mostly static, it had outdated information. We've replaced that with a much simpler UI: everything is in 1 screen, and subdivided into logical groups, e.g. based on OS version/region. Currently, they're available only in English and Dutch, but with time (and your help) this will improve even further.
• This ideology has been applied to our onboarding/first-launch UI as well: swipeable pages have been replaced with just 1 screen. No clutter, just quick entry into the app.
• Additionally, v6.0.0 finally allows you to use the app in other orientations, not just portrait. This is especially useful for tablets and foldables, although the UI hasn't been specially designed for those screens yet.
• Our app has had an in-app language picker since v5.1.0, but now we've also integrated with Android 13+ per-app languages. Funnily enough, OxygenOS 13 does not expose this screen in system settings, even though it's supposed to. OOS 14 has this properly visible to the user; in any case this feature will work on OOS13+.
• There are many other new features & improvements, so try it out and let us know what you think of it. We'll be looking out for your thoughts on this brand-new release.