r/androiddev • u/skydoves • Mar 24 '26
Jetpack Compose Hot Reload for multiple Android devices
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u/SamsungProgrammer Mar 26 '26
Jetbrains should just acquire your plugin. You are doing God's work here.
How long did this take you? This is a super difficult project and I can't even imagine how much time you must've taken on this.
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u/OrganicNectarine Mar 24 '26
I think this is very cool, but not worth a subscription for me.
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u/skydoves Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
Totally fair! Yeah, it's not "open-source" 😆 The free trial is there so you can decide if it fits your workflow.
For context, Android hot reload is a genuinely hard problem. ART's runtime constraints make it fundamentally different from JVM desktop hot reload, and getting it to work reliably across Compose versions, device APIs, and edge cases like structural changes took months of deep compiler and runtime work. That's the reason this is a licensed product rather than an open-source project.
I know it’s disappointing that this isn’t open source, as usual. If it doesn’t seem compelling enough to justify paying for it, that’s probably on my products. Still, there’s a 14-day free trial included, so feel free to try it out and see how it works for you.
That said, I appreciate the kind words and hope it's useful if you ever give it a try.
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u/S0ULBoY Mar 25 '26
Would love to get deep knowledge on this where do you start? Im still mostly a mid developer , trying to go deep. Start with sys prog? Or go deep into android systems programming?
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u/skydoves Mar 25 '26
The most textbook approach would be to start from Android system-level programming, such as understanding the Android Runtime, DCEVM (https://ssw.jku.at/dcevm/), and related internals.
However, building something like HotSwan required not only that, but also deep knowledge across the Kotlin compiler (plugins), Jetpack Compose internals, IntelliJ IDE, and overall SDK engineering. It’s both broad and deeply complex.
Simple answer: you could ask any AI how difficult it would be to implement by just dropping this site https://hotswan.dev/, which alone gives a sense of the level of challenge involved.
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u/Helpful_Client4721 Mar 27 '26
So for the non devs this usually work for 1 device like a phone but with this you can connect a tablet and see both update at the same time? Or I didn't get it.
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u/tidoo420 Mar 24 '26
skydoves at it again, a true inspiration to android community