In late 2025, Google released Jetpack Navigation 3, a major redesign of the Android Navigation library built specifically for Jetpack Compose and modern UI architectures. This is not a typical incremental update. Navigation 3 fundamentally changes how navigation state is modeled, owned, and rendered in an application.
If you have been using the Navigation Component with Compose through navigation-compose, the new version may feel unfamiliar at first. However, it aligns much more naturally with Compose’s reactive programming model and solves many long-standing limitations around state ownership, adaptive layouts, and complex navigation flows.