How It's Made
Announcing Coil 1.0
I’m very excited to announce the release of Coil 1.0. Coil is a Kotlin-first image loading library for Android built on top of Kotlin Coroutines. It simplifies loading images from the Internet (or any other data source) by automatically handling memory and disk caching, image downsampling, request cancellation, memory management, and more. Coil’s image pipeline is also fully extensible and supports decoding GIFs, SVGs, and video frames.
We’ve been using Coil at Instacart in both of our Android apps for over a year with great success. Over the past year we’ve refined its API, fixed plenty of bugs, improved its performance, and added support for new features including direct memory cache access, interceptors, custom transitions, and event listeners. Coil is fast (slightly faster than Glide), lightweight (~2000 methods for apps that already use Coroutines and OkHttp), easy to use, and its adoption is growing:
Jetpack Compose
Coil is also designed to integrate closely with Jetpack Compose – Android’s next generation UI toolkit. Both Coil and Compose build on top of Kotlin Coroutines and, unlike other image loading libraries, Coil is largely decoupled from Fragments and Views. The Android team even highlightedCoil in the videos for the Jetpack Compose alpha release. Coil currently doesn’t have first party support for Compose, however, we’re excited to add it once Jetpack Compose becomes API-stable. In the meantime check out Chris Banes’ Accompanist library, which adds a CoilImage composable.
The community’s response to Coil has been very encouraging and I’m excited to see where Coil goes from here. If you’re interested in helping improve Coil, there are a number of open issues to tackle. Also big thanks to John Carlson, Kaushik Gopal, Chris Banes, and everyone else who has supported the library and offered feedback.
Also Instacart is hiring – feel free to message me on Twitter or check out Instacart’s engineering openings if you’re interested joining the team.
Colin White
Author
Building Instacart Meals 
Introducing Coil: Kotlin-first Image Loading on Android 
7 steps to get started with large-scale labeling 
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