Introducing Trio | Part III
Article Summary
Airbnb just shipped 230+ production screens with their new Compose architecture. Here's how they solved the hardest problem: making screens talk to each other.
This is Part III of Airbnb's deep dive into Trio, their Jetpack Compose framework built on Mavericks. The Android Platform team explains how Props enable type-safe, compile-time-correct communication between ViewModels while handling the nightmare of process death.
Key Takeaways
- Props pass dynamic data and callbacks between parent and child screens with type safety
- ScreenFlow infrastructure manages navigation stacks with shared state across multiple screens
- Custom Android Studio plugin auto-generates boilerplate and refactors Args/Props across files
- 230+ Trio screens now in production with faster dev cycles and cleaner code
- Props flow survives process death through careful lifecycle management patterns
Airbnb's Trio framework achieved organic adoption across 230+ screens by making inter-screen communication both powerful and foolproof through Props and custom tooling.
About This Article
Airbnb engineers had to manually update files across the codebase whenever they changed a Trio's Args or Props types, since these values appeared in many different places.
Eli Hart's team built an IDE plugin that automatically refactors Args and Props type changes wherever they're used in the codebase. They used Compose Multiplatform to build the plugin's UI.
The tool made this workflow much faster and less tedious. Developers spent less time on routine refactoring work, which improved how smoothly the Trio development process ran at scale.