Building Custom Design Systems with Jetpack Compose’s New Styles API

 Android UI development is evolving rapidly. Applications are no longer satisfied with looking identical to every other Material Design app. Modern products want their own visual identity while still benefiting from the accessibility, responsiveness, and reliability of Material components.

To solve this challenge, the Android team introduced a new experimental feature for Jetpack Compose called the Styles API.

The new API aims to separate visual appearance from component behavior, making it easier to create fully customized design systems without sacrificing the performance and functionality developers already rely on.

Why Android Apps Need More Flexible Design Systems

As Android expands across phones, tablets, TVs, foldables, and desktop-like experiences, applications increasingly need flexible UI systems that adapt to multiple device types while maintaining a unique brand identity.

Some apps use:

• Full Material Design systems
• Completely custom design systems
• Hybrid approaches somewhere in between

The Android team recognized that developers need a framework capable of supporting all of these approaches.

One of the best examples of custom UI in Compose has always been the Jetsnack sample app. While it uses Material components internally, it applies highly customized visuals such as:

• Gradient-heavy interfaces
• Custom chips and buttons
• Unique shadows and borders
• Advanced interaction states

However, implementing these customizations traditionally required complicated workarounds.

The Problem with Traditional Customization

Customizing Material components has historically been difficult when developers wanted visuals beyond simple colors.

For example, imagine trying to create a filter chip with:

• A gradient border
• A gradient pressed state
• Custom hover effects

Material APIs were typically designed around single-color properties, not gradients or brushes.

Developers often ended up:

• Wrapping components inside extra containers
• Applying custom backgrounds manually
• Rebuilding state logic themselves
• Forking Material components entirely

This created several problems:

• More boilerplate code
• Harder maintenance
• Lost accessibility features
• Reduced compatibility with future updates

The Styles API was designed to eliminate these issues.

What Is the Styles API?

The Styles API is a new experimental feature introduced in Compose Foundation 1.12.

A Style defines the visual appearance of a component while keeping its behavior separate.

Instead of passing many visual parameters individually, developers can now provide a single Style object.

Traditional button definitions often required many styling parameters such as:

• Shape
• Border
• Background
• Disabled appearance
• Padding
• Typography

With Styles, all of these visual concerns can be centralized into one reusable styling object.

This creates cleaner APIs and significantly improves reusability.

Styles vs Modifiers

The Android team emphasized an important point:

Styles are not replacing modifiers.

Instead:

• Modifiers remain responsible for behavior and layout
• Styles handle visual appearance and theming

Modifiers are still used for:

• Click behavior
• Gestures
• Semantics
• Complex layouts

Styles focus on:

• Colors
• Borders
• Padding
• Typography
• Shadows
• Animations
• Component appearance

This separation helps developers structure UI systems more clearly.

Core Principles of the Styles API

The presentation introduced four fundamental rules of Styles.

1. Styles Are Overridable

If the same property is defined multiple times, the last value wins.

For example:

• A button may define 32dp padding
• A later style may override the top padding with 16dp

Unlike modifiers, Styles do not stack values together.

2. Styles Are Inheritable

Certain text-related properties can automatically flow down the component tree.

For example:

• A parent button can define centered text alignment
• Child text composables inherit that alignment automatically

This greatly simplifies consistent typography management.

3. Styles Are Reusable

Styles can be extracted into reusable objects and applied across multiple components.

For example:

• A shared button style
• A reusable gradient style
• A centralized card appearance

This helps establish consistency throughout the application.

4. Styles Are Mergeable

Multiple styles can be combined together.

A developer could merge:

• A base button style
• A gradient effect style
• A shadow style

The resulting component inherits all compatible properties while overridden values follow precedence rules.

Creating Beautiful Interactive Components

One of the most powerful features of Styles is built-in state-based styling.

Compose now supports styling different interaction states such as:

• Pressed
• Hovered
• Focused
• Default

For example:

• Hover state → lavender background
• Focus state → highlighted border
• Pressed state → darker gradient

Instead of manually tracking state changes, developers define styles declaratively.

This dramatically simplifies interactive UI development.

Built-In Animation Support

The Styles API also introduces integrated animations.

Instead of manually managing animated state variables, developers can wrap properties in animation blocks.

This allows smooth transitions between:

• Hover states
• Pressed states
• Background changes
• Shadow movement
• Gradient transitions

Animations can use custom specs such as:

• Tween animations
• Spring animations
• Timing curves

The result is cleaner code and more fluid interfaces.

Custom Style States

The Android team also introduced custom StyleState support.

This allows applications to define entirely new visual states beyond the built-in interaction states.

For example, a shopping app button may have:

• Loading
• Loaded
• Error

Each state can apply different visual styling automatically.

Examples include:

• Orange background while loading
• Red appearance for errors
• Default gradient for normal states

Custom states make complex UI logic far easier to manage.

Performance Benefits

One of the most impressive aspects of Styles is performance.

Benchmarks presented during the talk showed:

• Up to 70% fewer allocations
• Rendering speeds up to 2.3× faster
• Reduced composition work

The performance improvements come from several architectural optimizations:

• Styles are evaluated after composition
• Fewer modifiers are allocated
• Animations are created only when needed
• Layout and draw phases can update independently

This makes Styles especially attractive for highly interactive applications.

Theme Integration

The Styles API integrates naturally with design systems and themes.

Instead of hardcoding component visuals, developers can expose Style objects directly through their theme layer.

For example, a theme may define:

• Default button styles
• Typography tokens
• Gradient definitions
• Shape systems
• Light and dark mode variations

Components automatically adapt when theme tokens change.

This creates a scalable architecture similar to modern design token systems used across large applications.

Material 3 Integration

The Android team confirmed that Material 3 components will eventually adopt Styles directly.

This means developers will be able to customize Material components without:

• Forking source code
• Wrapping components unnecessarily
• Rebuilding behavior manually

Future Material buttons, chips, and other components will expose Style parameters for deep customization.

Adaptive Design with MediaQuery

The presentation also introduced another experimental API called MediaQuery.

MediaQuery allows Compose themes and Styles to adapt dynamically to device characteristics such as:

• Mouse support
• Window size
• Input methods
• Device type

For example:

• Buttons can become smaller on desktop devices with mouse input
• Touch-friendly spacing can increase on mobile devices

This makes it easier to build truly adaptive Android applications from a single design system.

When Should Developers Use Styles?

The Android team recommended using Styles when:

• Customizing existing components
• Creating reusable theme systems
• Building interactive visual states
• Managing animations efficiently
• Applying design-system-wide styling

Modifiers should still be used for:

• Behaviors
• Layout structure
• Gestures
• One-off positioning
• Accessibility semantics

Together, Styles and Modifiers create a cleaner separation between appearance and behavior.

Final Thoughts

The new Styles API represents a major evolution for Jetpack Compose.

It gives Android developers a modern way to build:

• Highly customized interfaces
• Reusable design systems
• Adaptive layouts
• Smooth interactive animations
• Better-performing UI components

Most importantly, it allows developers to preserve the benefits of Material Design while still creating interfaces that feel unique to their product.

As Compose continues evolving, Styles could become one of the most important tools for building scalable Android UI systems in the future.