preserving-state-across-reloads

Keep edits inside HotSwan tier 1 by changing only a single composable body, and back any state you want to survive escalation with rememberSaveable instead of remember. For long iteration sessions, hoist transient UI state into a ViewModel, which survives all three reload tiers.

Scroll resets when the reload escalates to tier 2 composition reset, which disposes per-composable remember values. Use rememberLazyListState with stable item keys, since it is backed by a Saveable and survives composition reset and Activity recreation.

remember values are lost when HotSwan escalates to tier 2 composition reset, while rememberSaveable values are retained through a Saveable and survive the reset. Convert any UI state you want to keep across reloads to rememberSaveable.

Editing a value used by MaterialTheme or any staticCompositionLocalOf invalidates the root CompositionLocalProvider content, which HotSwan cannot scope to a single recomposition target, so it escalates to tier 2. Move the value into a local override on the composable being tuned during iteration.

Yes, ViewModel state survives all three HotSwan tiers including tier 3 Activity.recreate, as well as configuration changes generally. Hoisting selected tab, dialog open, and scroll state into a ViewModel keeps the iteration workbench intact.

Do not use it when the change was rejected as a schema violation and HotSwan fell back to a full build, when HotSwan is not installed or watching, or when the problem is overly wide recomposition unrelated to hot reload, which needs recomposition debugging instead.