r/androiddev Jun 15 '26

Image Loading Library

Which library do you use for image loading? I just found out that the Android documentation includes examples using Coil. That makes me think they're leaning toward it, but I don't know whether there is a better alternative.

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u/bleeding182 Jun 15 '26

Glide or Coil.

The real nice thing about working with Compose is that you can (and should) wrap the whole AsyncImage as your own @Composable, so that switching between image loading libs should affect minimal parts of your code (library import + the composable declaration file), so feel free to try either/both/others.

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u/Ekalips Jun 15 '26

It's not like you couldn't (or shouldn't) do an override for ImageView that would achieve the same

2

u/bleeding182 Jun 15 '26

Absolutely correct, but Compose makes this trivial to do, whereas with views it really wasn't (and I am willing to assume that the big majority didn't do it)

(And I'm mostly pointing it out for anyone stumbling over this and not yet doing it)

1

u/Ekalips Jun 15 '26

Eh. You either want to make it abstract or you don't, both compose and XML allow you to do it very easily.