I'm not really getting the point of this default surface in a new Compose Activity. What's it's purpose? And why does it set the background color?

Well I guess this is just an example

Oh interesting, I didn't know Scaffold includes Surface

Yep many other material components include Surface

thank you

Yeah if you remove it in the Greetings example and run the app in dark mode, you can see your

Text

won't pick up the white color automatically so it will show black text on a black background

ah this makes sense, thank you very much!

@Florian I also asked something similar to this a while back. And one thing I learned (from Nick Butcher I think) is that a surface also clips it's children which compose doesn't clip children by default, so you could run into some issues in that.

@Colton Idle what do you mean by "clip"?

In xml land the equivallent is

android:clipChildren

which is set to true by default. In compose, clipping is set to false by default.

interesting, thank you