androidx

Just learned about androidx, this new package name Google uses or will use for support libraries and similar stuff:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51280090/what-is-androidx https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/

Will this affect cordova-android?

[davidschreiber]

Hi there 👋I’d like to better understand the current schedule for the AndroidX migration of cordova-android.

We (the team at PSPDFKit, and maintainers of PSPDFKit/Cordova-Android) have previously upgraded our Android library to AndroidX (as many of our customers did with their apps and libraries too). We’re currently getting reports of Cordova users that fail to upgrade due to the lack of AndroidX support in cordova-android. We’ve performed a brief analysis of the current situation, and thought it might be interesting for you as well.

There’s a couple of factors that should be considered for your schedule for migrating to AndroidX:

• Development of the support libraries has been halted and the old support libraries have officially been deprecated. In the next couple of weeks/months, most Android libraries and apps that used the support libs will migrate to AndroidX (if they haven’t done so already). The incompatibility we discovered with our own wrapper is probably just the beginning, and cordova-android will have to follow this trend to stay compatible with the Android ecosystem. A migration has to happen, the question is when it should be done.

• Moving to AndroidX is a breaking change for Cordova, so it should probably be part of the next major update (9.x). While for normal Android apps upgrading to AndroidX is a soft-migration (using Google’s automated Jetifier migration which auto-migrates old .class files that use the support libs over to AndroidX) this migration strategy does not work for Cordova, which is built around plugins that ship as .java source files. Jetifier was not designed for such a plugin system, and does not operate on source files, which means that all Cordova plugins need to be migrated manually in order to work.

• Integrating AndroidX and the support libraries into a single app does not work. While most classes inside AndroidX have been renamed and are now inside the androidx.* package, some legacy code is still inside the old support package names, which will cause build errors when trying to integrate both libraries side by side.

• Migration to AndroidX will require updates to the Android part of several official Cordova plugins. I don’t have an extensive list of plugins that use the support libs yet, but I believe that the effort to migrate these should be manageable. From our experience, migrating works automatic for most parts using Android Studio, or is a matter of search and replace using any other tool.

Are there any concrete plans for migration to AndroidX so far, and if so, could you share them with us? Any feedback would be highly appreciated.

[davidschreiber]

I created a small sample project by following these steps:

cordova create cordova-example2 com.pspdfkit.cordovaexample cordova-example
# Brings in AndroidX
cordova plugin add https://github.com/PSPDFKit/Cordova-Android/
# Brings in the Support Library
cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-camera
# Required for building PSPDFKit
cordova platform add [e-mail]243418

In order to build the project, you need to bump compile target to 28 and add a Maven key and License for building PSPDFKit.

Add this to platforms/android/local.properties. It’s an evaluation license of PSPDFKit:

pspdfkit.password=TRIAL-Z5d2Z7Ftr4ZQADAIwysuZ92Algq5fGJnJTZfNJgP0eSDGZBR0Gmc-8X65tQ2d6FtqmfU4bWfSm39uheDddwpXw
pspdfkit.license=I-N0J9nyZmqpre3nBv5Y5w9UxiuEYDIvY8GLUFBvD1-NlDxjLMSwXhgcd8zC6XdIy53divvD9BZfvZYERS2xV9tW7rFChXglO7m8XdzZEIWv94vspD_LY4X-6S6HucpgLkvl0nbjnEZdy1Nz5hv4Ek_p80Ilwin2dCBxQiJaH32H85U7vsL_hfXLZGEClHisNSnMAOVgdbEIZRttegjADstK0UDSqXoUDkrIUWmyeg_SqcnPDpEVGTg5URsnvzc3gdbzdsEnnslSfsSqKzU7OAQ78MtOHBbkZsLyQc0mlxLCU44NcLUE_6XGq2gdLae-aDafbnUNOqhXmB4kkwfuAWrSIApyU3jj7Bfrsa0HINPgkCIrjaTBW8izE69JlbFB5wRKKOoALXQiMqAJALg_DYKD7zCbyj5ES_k3mRzOmttxyGsCzognYVXGnq1c0Tr5

Change content of platforms/android/gradle.properties to this. This will set the correct compile SDK version and will prepare the project for building:

org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m
android.useDeprecatedNdk=true

cdvCompileSdkVersion=android-28
cdvBuildToolsVersion=28.0.3
android.enableD8=true

You can now run the build, which will fail due to a conflict between AndroidX and the Support Library:

cordova build android -- --gradleArg=--stacktrace

In order to check that migrating the plugin to AndroidX works, I’ve created a small PR that actually migrates the plugin: https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-camera/pull/418.

By swapping out the plugin with my PR version, you can verify that the migration works:

corcova plugin remove cordova-plugin-camera
cordova plugin add https://github.com/davidschreiber/cordova-plugin-camera\#davidschreiber/androidx-migration
cordova build android -- --gradleArg=--stacktrace