It has been over three years since the launch of the Android Developer Roadmap, and Android technologies continue to evolve rapidly across various areas. At the time, Jetpack Compose had just reached its 1.0 stable release, and developers were eagerly anticipating its maturity and ecosystem growth.
Over time, numerous solutions and tools have emerged to address development challenges, significantly improving Android projects. Notably, Android Studio's performance has greatly improved, and AI-powered integrations within the IDE now assist developers in writing code more efficiently. However, the core fundamentals of building Android applications have remained relatively stable.
In this article, you’ll examine the multi-part article series that began in 2021 and provided a comprehensive perspective on the Android community and developer growth, evaluating whether these insights remain relevant today.
Recap the Multi-Part Article Series
Now, let’s revisit the multi-part article series, consisting of five articles, and discuss whether these insights are still relevant today.
Part 1: The Android Platform
The Android Platform is the first part of this series, covering five key topics: Android programming languages, Android OS, the Android Platform Architecture, and the App Manifest.
The core fundamentals of Android have remained largely unchanged over the past three years. Kotlin has grown to be the dominant language for Android development, and the overall architecture of the Android OS has remained stable. If you're interested in understanding the structure of Android OS, this article is still a valuable resource.
Part 2: App Components
The second part, App Components, explores essential application components such as Activity, Service, Broadcast Receiver, and Content Provider, which remain fundamental to Android development and are still used in the same way today. Managing component lifecycles is crucial for optimizing resource usage and ensuring efficient app performance.
This section also covers Intents and App Entry Points, both of which are still relevant and have remained largely unchanged over the past several years.
Part 3: App Navigation and Jetpack
The third part, App Navigation and Jetpack, covers key Android components and Jetpack libraries, including Fragments, App Navigation, Architecture Components, and Android Jetpack.
If your project is fully built with Jetpack Compose, Fragments and App Navigation may be less relevant, as Jetpack Compose provides its own dedicated navigation library. Similarly, UI libraries such as ViewBinding, DataBinding, and LiveData are becoming less prominent as most new projects have transitioned to Jetpack Compose and Coroutine’s Flow.
However, Jetpack libraries related to the data layer, such as DataStore, Room, and WorkManager, remain widely used and are still highly relevant in 2025, making them valuable topics to learn.
Part 4: Design Patterns and Architecture
Part 4, Design Patterns and Architecture, covers key topics such as Design Patterns, Architecture, Asynchronous Processing, Networking, and Local Storage.
These concepts remain fundamental for structuring Android projects effectively, ensuring maintainability, scalability, and efficient data handling.
Design patterns and software architecture are crucial not only for Android development but for software development in general. They help create robust and scalable code structures, improve maintainability (though not always, but often), and establish clear roles between dependencies or layers within a large project.
Fetching data from the network and managing persistence or database queries remain essential for most modern applications and will continue to be relevant, making them valuable skills to learn.
Additionally, understanding asynchronous solutions is also important in modern Android development to efficiently handle I/O tasks, such as network requests and database operations, ensuring smooth and responsive app performance.
Part 5: Jetpack Compose
The final part, Jetpack Compose, explores key topics including the Compose structure, Compose UI, State management, Side effects, CompositionLocal, and the migration strategy from XML to Jetpack Compose.
Since the stable 1.0 release of Jetpack Compose, its adoption in production apps has grown significantly. According to Google's 2023 statistics, over 125,000 apps built with Jetpack Compose have been published on the Play Store, and this number is expected to increase even further by 2025.
While some companies still rely on XML or are in the process of migrating to Jetpack Compose, most new projects now favor Jetpack Compose from the start. Given this shift, learning Jetpack Compose is becoming essential for modern Android development.
Relevant Questions
We’ve revisited the five-part Android Developer Roadmap series and evaluated whether the knowledge it covers is still relevant, given the time since its initial release. Now, let’s explore some of the most frequently asked questions from the developer community regarding the roadmap.
Do I need to learn everything to be an Android expert?
The Android Developer Roadmap was created to guide developers—especially juniors—who are unsure where to start or what to focus on to become better Android developers. So, you don’t need to learn everything it covers, and you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by the volume of materials. In reality, many crucial skills are learned through real-world experience while working in a team.
Selectively focus on the topics that are most relevant to your current needs rather than trying to cover everything. Hopefully, this roadmap provides valuable keywords to help you identify where to start your Android development journey. There is no single "correct" learning path—priorities, sequences, and importance will vary based on individual goals and circumstances.
As a junior developer, is learning XML still necessary?
As discussed earlier, Jetpack Compose has been widely adopted in production globally, with many new teams choosing it over XML due to its increased productivity. Major global products have already integrated Jetpack Compose into their production environments, leading to rapid ecosystem growth and a wealth of competitive solutions and showcases from the developer community.
JetBrains has also been actively promoting Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, enabling developers to build UI layers with Jetpack Compose for multiple platforms, including Android, iOS, Desktop, and WebAssembly (Wasm). Given its expanding cross-platform capabilities, Jetpack Compose is no longer just an option—it has become an essential skill for modern Android developers.
That said, XML is still in use, particularly in larger companies where migrating an entire codebase to Jetpack Compose requires significant resources. Many large-scale applications either continue to use XML or are in the gradual migration process. If you aim to work at a big tech company, understanding XML fundamentals remains important for maintaining legacy components and implementing new features. While deep expertise in XML may not be necessary, having a solid grasp of its core concepts will be beneficial.
Which part is the most important?
Each part of the series covers different aspects of Android development, and the importance of each topic should be determined based on individual needs and circumstances. Part 2 and Part 3 focus on Android fundamentals, which have remained essential for building Android applications for over a decade.
Part 4 explores design patterns and architecture, which, while valuable, is relatively less critical than foundational Android knowledge. The choice of design patterns and architectural approaches varies based on the team, project requirements, and available resources, making them beneficial but not universally mandatory.
Part 5 provides a comprehensive overview of Jetpack Compose, making it a valuable resource for those new to Compose or looking to deepen their understanding of modern UI development in Android.
Conclusion
In this article, we revisited the multi-part Android Developer Roadmap to evaluate its relevance and whether it remains valuable for modern development in 2025. While technology continues to evolve, it’s crucial to stay updated with new advancements, but we shouldn’t overlook the fundamental concepts that serve as the foundation of development.
If you have any questions or feedback on this article, you can find the author on Twitter @github_skydoves or GitHub if you have any questions or feedback. If you’d like to stay up to date with Stream, follow us on Twitter @getstream_io for more great technical content.
As always, happy coding!
— Jaewoong