Google has announced the stable release of Jetpack Navigation 3 (Nav3), a new navigation library designed to align fully with modern Android development practices centred on Jetpack Compose and reactive state management.
Nav3 replaces the internal state handling found in Navigation 2 (Nav2) with an approach in which developers supply and control their own navigation state. This enables a single source of truth for navigation, full back-stack control, improved state retention, and predictable behaviour in reactive UIs. The library is composed of smaller, decoupled APIs that can be combined to create complex navigation flows, replacing the monolithic design of Nav2.
Key features include:
- Back-stack management driven entirely by developer-provided Compose state.
- NavDisplay, a new UI component that observes a list of navigation keys and renders screens reactively.
- Support for adaptive and multi-pane layouts through the Scenes API.
- Customisable screen animations at both global and per-destination level.
- Replaceable components, enabling developers to supply custom behaviour for any part of the navigation stack.
- A cross-platform implementation maintained by JetBrains for Compose Multiplatform.
Migration from Navigation 2
Google provides a structured migration guide for teams currently using Navigation Compose. Key steps include adding Nav3 dependencies, updating routes to optionally implement NavKey, creating classes to manage navigation state, replacing NavController, moving destinations from NavGraph into an entryProvider, and swapping NavHost for NavDisplay. A persistent back stack can be achieved using rememberNavBackStack.
The announcement also highlights the option of using AI agents, such as Gemini in Android Studio’s Agent Mode, to automate migration tasks, although manual verification remains essential.
Recipes and ecosystem
Google has published a repository of “navigation recipes” demonstrating how to combine Nav3’s building blocks for common patterns, including multiple back stacks, modular architectures, dependency injection, argument passing to ViewModels (including Koin), and result propagation across screens. Additional recipes—such as deep links and expanded Koin support—are under development, alongside a Compose Multiplatform version contributed by JetBrains.
Adoption and documentation
JetBrains is already using Nav3 in production, notably in the KotlinConf application. Developers can begin integrating Nav3 immediately by consulting the official documentation and recipe repository.
Google will run a dedicated “Nav3 Spotlight Week” starting on 1 December 2025, featuring a deep-dive video on the API, guidance on modularisation and animations, and a live Q&A with the engineering team.
