[enhancement]: Migrate codebase to jetpack compose

[itsPronay]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Migrate codebase to jetpack compose. Jetpack Compose is the modern toolkit for building native Android UIs. By adopting Compose, Kiwix can simplify UI development, improve maintainability, and ensure the app aligns with the latest Android development practices.

Describe the solution you'd like

Migration can be carried out in 2 phrases, In the first migration, we can migrate screens, and then use them with views In the second migration, we can remove Fragments and Navigation components

To get a full idea of how the migration will take place please view official docs on Migration strategy

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

Benefits of Jetpack Compose

• Simplified UI Development: Compose allows developers to write less code, reducing boilerplate and making the UI code more intuitive and easier to maintain.

• Improved Performance: Compose is designed to be more efficient, which can result in better app performance and responsiveness.

• Better Integration with Kotlin: Compose is fully Kotlin-based, providing a seamless development experience with Kotlin features like coroutines and flows.

• Future-Proof: Google is actively developing and promoting Compose as the future of Android development, ensuring long-term support and innovation.

[itsPronay]

@BenHenning Hey, what do you think about migrating codebase to jetpack compose ? since everyone is adopting it.

[BenHenning]

Thanks for filing this @itsPronay! This has been on our list for many years, but we never actually filed an issue, so this is a great one to use as the main feature request.

At a high-level, we definitely want to move to Jetpack Compose in the long-term. Besides the benefits you listed, Jetpack Compose has very specific benefits that I think we're interested in:

• It's a more stable replacement for Android databinding.
• It consolidates code to a single language for most of the app (Kotlin).
• It has a much smaller coding footprint over the much-more-verbose XML.

However, there are some cascading challenges that I see with migrating to Compose:

• We've noticed some compatibility issues with newer Compose libraries and the old version of AGP that we use. For reasons a bit too detailed to go into here, migrating to a newer version of AGP is very likely not an option. This means we'll likely need to finish resolving #59 before we can dedicate an effort to moving to Jetpack Compose.
• Since this migration would be touching the entire app UI, we would want to ensure that we can effectively verify the changes. Since it's so visually heavy, we'd very much likely want screenshot testing in place (#1815).
• Screenshot testing itself will likely require some heavier test infrastructure changes to get Espresso consistently working in the Bazel world, including parts of #2047 and probably some more Bazel-specific elements.

To summarize, both the migration and prepping for it will be a large undertaking. :) However, we are interested in doing this. In fact, we're prototyping our first UI using Compose in #5344 but we'll probably not go past that new UI for now without more of the above addressed.

In terms of timeline, I can't really say when we'll be able to start on these efforts as it greatly depends on contributor availability and willingness. At the moment, we're planning on finishing the Bazel migration in completion this year, but there aren't yet plans for screenshot testing or test uniformity fixing.