Android Developers Blog: What’s new in the Jetpack Compose August ’25 release
Article Summary
The Jetpack Compose team just dropped their August '25 release, and it's packed with updates Android devs have been waiting for.
Google's Android Developers Blog announced the latest Jetpack Compose release with significant improvements across performance, tooling, and developer experience. This monthly update continues Google's commitment to evolving their modern UI toolkit for native Android development.
Key Takeaways
- New performance optimizations reduce composition overhead and improve rendering speed
- Enhanced Material 3 components with better accessibility support built in
- Improved preview tooling in Android Studio for faster UI iteration
- Stability updates across core Compose libraries for production readiness
The August release brings meaningful performance gains and developer experience improvements that make Compose more production ready than ever.
About This Article
Developers didn't have good options for rendering box-shadow effects or checking if elements were visible on screen. The existing Modifier.shadow() only worked with elevation-based shadows from a lighting model.
Jetpack Compose added Modifier.dropShadow() and Modifier.innerShadow() so developers can render custom shadows. It also added onVisibilityChanged and onFirstVisible APIs that use onLayoutRectChanged under the hood to track visibility without hurting performance.
Lazy List and Lazy Grid scroll faster now thanks to the new LazyLayoutCacheWindow API. It lets you customize how items are prefetched by setting viewport fractions or dp sizes for items ahead and behind the visible area.