android/sunflower

Android Sunflower is a sample gardening app created by the Android team to demonstrate best practices for Android development, with a specific focus on migrating an existing app built with the traditional View-based UI system to Jetpack Compose. Jetpack Compose is a modern approach to building Android user interfaces where you describe what the screen should look like using code rather than XML layout files. The app itself is a plant tracking tool, users can browse plants, view details, and manage a personal garden. The functionality is deliberately simple so the focus remains on the code structure and patterns rather than product complexity. It shows how a real app that was originally written using Android's older XML-based Views (Material Design 2) can be gradually migrated to Compose (Material Design 3) piece by piece, rather than requiring a full rewrite all at once. The project is written in Kotlin, Google's recommended language for Android development. It uses the Unsplash API to load plant photos in the gallery screen, so you need a free API key from Unsplash to see that part of the app, though the rest works without it. The README notes that this repository is no longer actively maintained by the Android team, who have shifted focus to the compose-samples repository as the current reference for Compose best practices. Sunflower remains useful as a study case for the migration journey specifically. It is aimed at Android developers who want to see how to adopt Compose in an existing codebase without starting from scratch.