Jetpack Compose: State Management for Flutter Developers

This article explores state management in Jetpack Compose for Flutter developers, explaining how Compose's declarative UI approach aligns with Flutter's. It compares Compose concepts with Flutter equivalents to facilitate a smooth transition.

The Shared Philosophy: Declarative UIs

In both Compose and Flutter:

• You never imperatively change the UI.
• Instead, you update state, and the framework recomposes affected parts of the UI tree.

Composables vs Widgets

Think of a Composable function like a StatelessWidget in Flutter — except it can also hold transient state without needing a separate StatefulWidget class.

Practical Concepts Examples

• ViewModel as a source of truth (like Flutter’s Provider/Riverpod)
• Local UI state with remember (like setState)
• Reactive streams via StateFlow (similar to StreamProvider)
• Lifecycle-aware collection (avoiding memory leaks)
• Reusable UI logic via StateHolder (like ChangeNotifier + Mixin)

ViewModel

In Compose, we use ViewModel as the central state owner.

Collecting State in Composables

In Compose, you use collectAsStateWithLifecycle().

Local UI State: remember vs setState

In Compose, we use remember (and rememberSaveable to persist across configuration changes).

Reusable UI Logic: The StateHolder Pattern

The StateHolder pattern is a clean way to organize and reuse UI logic while keeping your composables stateless.

Lifecycle and Side Effects

In Compose, that’s what LaunchedEffects does. It takes a key parameter, and the effect will re-run every time that key changes.