A Cleaner Way to Pass Navigation Arguments in Navigation 3

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:11:30 +0900

Recently I came across an interesting article about using Hilt Assisted Injection with Jetpack Navigation 3 instead of relying on SavedStateHandle for passing navigation arguments to a ViewModel.

The idea is simple: rather than having a ViewModel read navigation arguments from SavedStateHandle, pass the route object directly through Assisted Injection.

The Traditional Approach

For a long time, many Android apps have used SavedStateHandle to retrieve navigation arguments:

class DetailViewModel(
    savedStateHandle: SavedStateHandle
) : ViewModel() {

    private val route = savedStateHandle.toRoute<DetailRoute>()
}

This works well, but it also means the ViewModel knows about navigation-specific APIs.

Android on Chanzmao ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear Blog

A Cleaner Way to Pass Navigation Arguments in Navigation 3

The Traditional Approach