I still have nightmares about RecyclerView.Adapter.

Writing hundreds of lines of boilerplate just to show a simple list of text on a screen. We accepted it for a decade because we didn't know any better. We just copied and pasted the same adapter code from old projects, hit run, and hoped we didn't get a NullPointerException.

But let's be blunt. Building Android UIs the old way was a mess.

What's Actually Broken with the Old Way

The biggest flaw in classic Android dev was the massive wall between your layout and your logic.

You had XML files sitting in one folder and Kotlin (or Java) code sitting in another. They didn't talk naturally. You had to bridge them with clunky tools like findViewById or ViewBinding. You'd change an ID in the XML, forget to update the fragment, and bam. The app crashes the second a user opens it.

State management was a complete joke. If a user logged in, you had to manually find the profile image view, set it to visible, find the login button, hide it, and update a text view. If the network dropped during that exact half-second, your UI was stuck in a broken, half-loaded state. It was brittle. It caused bugs that took days to track down.

What Actually Works: The Compose Shift

Jetpack Compose fixes the root problem. It's declarative.

Instead of manually digging in and mutating the UI, you just describe what the screen should look like based on the current data state. If the user is logged in, show X. If not, show Y. When the data changes, Compose just redraws the screen. Automatically.

The Pros:

It's all Kotlin. No context-switching between XML and code.
Massive code reduction. You can build a complex animated list in 20 lines of code instead of 200.
True reusability. You build a custom button once, tweak its parameters, and drop it anywhere.

The Cons (Let's be honest):

The learning curve hurts. Shifting your brain from imperative to declarative thinking takes a few weeks to really click.
Navigation is clunky. The built-in Compose navigation library still feels like a step backward compared to the old XML nav graphs. Setup was a pain for our team initially.

A 2 a.m. War Story

I saw the old system completely break down during a massive Black Friday rollout for a retail client.

We had a highly complex checkout screen mixing a shopping cart, recommended upsell items, and active promo codes. The state logic got so tangled between the XML views and the ViewModel that the UI started lying to users. People were seeing empty carts while their backend session actually had items selected.

It was a nightmare. A client lost roughly $40K in three hours because users couldn't check out. We frantically fixed it by rolling back to an older build.

The next month, we ripped out that entire checkout flow and rewrote it in Compose. We cut the UI code by 60%. But more importantly, the state sync bugs vanished entirely. Because the UI finally had a single source of truth, it became impossible for the screen to lie about what was in the cart.

The Visual Shift: Code Volume

Here's a quick look at the reality of maintaining these two systems.

Code Required to Build a Simple Dynamic List:

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The Final Verdict

XML is legacy code. Google knows it, and the community knows it. If you're starting a new Android project today, you use Compose. Period.

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