Navigation 3 for Jetpack Compose

Each destination has a key, and an entryProvider resolves keys to composable content. The back stack is a list you create and change yourself: navigating means adding a key, going back means removing one. NavDisplay observes that list and updates the UI with animations. Scene strategies let one layout show several destinations at once, such as list and detail on a large screen, and the Material 3 adaptive add-on, androidx.compose.material3.adaptive:adaptive-navigation3, provides ready strategies. Entries can pass metadata to their layout and return results to other entries.

rememberNavBackStack creates a back stack that survives configuration changes and process death, as long as every key implements NavKey and is marked @Serializable, which needs the KotlinX Serialization plugin. You can keep the back stack in a ViewModel instead, but then you serialize and restore it yourself. To scope a ViewModel to one screen rather than the activity, add androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-viewmodel-navigation3 and pass rememberSaveableStateHolderNavEntryDecorator() and rememberViewModelStoreNavEntryDecorator() to entryDecorators on NavDisplay. The ViewModel is then created when the entry joins the back stack and cleared when it’s popped. Because keys are your own classes, screen arguments are fields on the key; Google’s recipes repository shows how to pass them to a ViewModel.

Google’s guide has seven steps: add the Navigation 3 dependencies, make every route implement NavKey, create classes that hold navigation state, replace NavController with them, move destinations from the NavHost graph into an entryProvider, replace NavHost with NavDisplay, and remove Navigation 2. Before you start you need compileSdk 36 and minSdk 23, type-safe routes rather than string routes, and destinations that are composables; Fragments need the Views-in-Compose interop. The guide assumes a single atomic migration rather than mixing both libraries. It doesn’t yet cover more than one level of nested navigation, destinations shared between back stacks, or custom destination types. Bottom sheets, modular navigation, ViewModel arguments and returning results are covered by recipes. Google also publishes an agent skill: android skills add navigation-3, see Android skills in Android Studio.

The AndroidX runtime artifact targets JVM, iOS and other native platforms, and web, but the AndroidX UI artifact with NavDisplay is Android-only. JetBrains ships a multiplatform UI implementation, org.jetbrains.androidx.navigation3:navigation3-ui, supported from Compose Multiplatform 1.10 on Android, iOS, desktop and web. On non-JVM targets you register polymorphic serialization for your keys, and Google’s notes say multiplatform state saving uses the rememberNavBackStack overload with an explicit SavedStateConfiguration. The 1.2.0 deep link API is multiplatform too. For the build side of KMP projects, see migrating to AGP 9; for iOS styling, see Compose Multiplatform and Liquid Glass.

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