Introducing Coil: Kotlin-first Image Loading on Android

I’m excited to announce Coil — an open-source Kotlin-first image loading library for Android. Coil is fast, lightweight, modern, and treats Kotlin Coroutines, OkHttp, Okio, and AndroidX Lifecycles as first-class citizens. Coil is an acronym for Coroutine Image Loader.

With hundreds of millions of catalog listings, we load a lot of images at Instacart. On the Android team, our choice of image loading library is one of the most important parts of our app.

Here’s what Coil looks like:

// To load an image into an ImageView, use the load extension function.
imageView.load("https://www.example.com/image.jpg")

// Coil supports urls, uris, resources, drawables, bitmaps, files, and more.
imageView.load(R.drawable.image)
imageView.load(File("/path/to/image.jpg"))
imageView.load("content://com.android.externalstorage/image.jpg")

// Requests can be configured with an optional trailing lambda.
imageView.load("https://www.example.com/image.jpg") {
    crossfade(true)
    placeholder(R.drawable.image)
    transformations(CircleCropTransformation())
}

// Internally, ImageView.load() is powered by the singleton ImageLoader.
val imageLoader = context.imageLoader

// Optionally, you can create and inject your own instance(s).
val imageLoader = ImageLoader(context)

// Enqueue an ImageRequest to load the image asynchronously into a custom target.
val request = ImageRequest.Builder(context)
    .data("https://www.example.com/image.jpg")
    .target { drawable ->
        // Handle the successful result.
    }
    .build()
imageLoader.enqueue(request)

// Execute an ImageRequest to suspend and return the drawable.
val request = ImageRequest.Builder(context)
    .data("https://www.example.com/image.jpg")
    .build()
val drawable = imageLoader.execute(request).drawable

Another image loading library?

While there are several image loading library options for Android developers today, we felt there was an opportunity to create a more modern, simpler product. Coil was created with the following goals:

• Leverage Kotlin language features including extension functions, inlining, lambda params, and sealed classes to create a simple, elegant API.
• Leverage Kotlin Coroutines as they offer strong support for non-blocking asynchronous computation and work cancellation while maximizing thread reuse.
• Use modern dependencies. Square’s OkHttp and Okio are standard dependencies for every Android app. They’re efficient by default and allow Coil to avoid reimplementing disk caching and stream buffering. Similarly, AndroidX Lifecycles are now the recommended way to track lifecycle state; Coil is the only image loading library that supports them.
• Lightweight. Coil has almost 8x fewer lines of codethan Glide and slightly less than Picasso. Also, Coil adds ~1500 methods to your APK (for apps that already use OkHttp and Coroutines), which is comparable to Picasso and significantly less than Glide and Fresco.
• Support extensions. Coil’s image pipeline is composed of three main classes Mappers, Fetchers, and Decoders. These interfaces can be used to augment and/or override the base behavior and add support for new file types in Coil.
• Improve testing. Coil’s main service class, ImageLoader, is an interface. This allows you to write fake ImageLoader implementations for your tests. Coil also supports dependency injection, as it provides singleton and non-singleton artifacts.
• Avoid annotation processing, which can often slow down build speeds. Coil relies on Kotlin extension functions instead.

We’ve worked hard to make sure Coil covers the existing functionality supported by other image loaders, but we also wanted to throw in an additional unique feature:

Dynamic image sampling

Colin White

Author