Not wanting to ruffle feathers, but I was surprise...

# android-studio

[Mark]

Not wanting to ruffle feathers, but I was surprised to see the new stable release of AS Iguana still doesn’t have New Project templates for anything Compose… Still legacy Views and XML layouts.

[Colton Idle]

Really? I feel like those new project templates have had compose for a while. let me try...

[Guilherme Cordeiro]

Just to be sure, but have you checked if your JetpackCompose plugin is disabled for any reason?

[Mark]

Installed and not disabled. Are you seeing something else regarding New Project?

[Mark]

Screenshot 2024-03-05 at 22.11.21.png

[Colton Idle]

Isn't that a compose project right there?

[Colton Idle]

Thats what i always use for a new compose project

[Guilherme Cordeiro]

But you are right in the matter that most templates are still view-based

[Colton Idle]

Yeah, not much but the "doesn't have New Project templates for anything Compose" is a bit misleading 😂

[Chris Sinco [G]]

The top one Empty Acitvity is the Compose one. We are actually looking to reduce the amount of templates we have because they are difficult to maintain and can never quite scale to every users needs. So we are looking to refocus on very bare bones templates. The ones you see there for Views were created before and we decided to leave them for now. But it’s likely they’ll be removed or replaced as well.

[Chris Sinco [G]]

There are many Compose samples online on GitHub which are easier to maintain outside of Android Studio builds, so for now please refer to those if you’re looking for starting points beyond the empty template here.

[Guilherme Cordeiro]

Makes perfect sense!
Have you also experimented or tested some kind of link on the wizard UI to lead the users to said samples? Maybe it is an opportunity to at least point people on the right direction

[Chris Sinco [G]]

We haven’t had the bandwidth to experiment much. But I’ve thought about redesigning the New Project wizard to include browsing samples since currently that is a separate wizard, i.e. “Import Samples…“, so users can see both paths in one place.

[Mark]

A web developer friend of mine recently installed AS to play around with it. Presumably he didn’t select the Empty Activity template, so ended up with View/XML layouts. Not a great first impression of modern Android development. Probably better to remove them completely? Maybe rename Empty Activity to Basic Compose Activity or something else to indicate Compose.