i. What You Need

To follow along with this book, you’ll need the following:

• Kotlin 1.4: Since Jetpack Compose relies on a special Kotlin compiler, you need Kotlin 1.4 both to write the code and for the compiler to process special Jetpack Compose annotations.
• Android Studio Canary: Jetpack Compose is still in its infancy, in an alpha version, and you need to use bleeding edge versions of Android Studio to use it. Currently, that’s an Android Studio Canary build — currently the Arctic Fox release.
• Android 5.1+: The minimumSdkVersion for the projects targets API 21, so you need a device or an emulator running API 21 or higher.
• Jetpack Compose Beta04 or greater: This is the Jetpack Compose version you’ll use in the book, and it represents one of the latest versions out there. But because Jetpack Compose is updated every few weeks, there might be a newer version available by the time you read this. We suggest following the book and using the projects with the version we used. You can always explore newer versions of the toolkit, but you might have to apply different migrations to the code. After all, things change frequently in beta versions!