Navigation Focus Support in 2024: Support Keyboard Navigation with Compose!

Android users can operate applications without touching the screen. Depending on the situation, they can use a variety of external devices such as a keyboard, a remote control, or even a game controller. Although you may have experience supporting these situations, have you tried it with Compose? If keyboard navigation is not taken into account during development, it can lead to poor keyboard user experiences, or even make the app become completely unusable. As Compose becomes more and more popular, now more than ever, developers need to update their understanding of it. In this session, we will start by getting a solid understanding of the basics, including the concept of focus navigation. We will then go through a checklist of points to keep in mind when supporting navigation without touch screen input, and also how to solve them with XML. Finally, I will show you how the current navigation concepts will change in the world of Compose and how you can solve the problems of the checklist. May you be able to support all users even if we move to Compose!! (Translated by the DroidKaigi Committee)

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  Tiphaine (ティフェン) Android engineer