[GitHub] [cordova-android] breautek commented on pull request #1052: breaking: only support androidx

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breautek commented on pull request #1052:
URL: https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/1052#issuecomment-676300697


   > Have a Look into this PR. I changed the **CordovaActivity** to extend **AppCompatActivity** and not normal **Activity** anymore. I think this is the Change that will break many Plugins and won't be fixed by the androidx-adapter-plugin  or am i wrong
   
   Yah once the framework depends on the androidx support library, this forces everyone, and any plugins they use to also use androidx support libraries rather than the old deprecated support libraries. This is essentially anything inside the `android.support` namespace.
   
   Therefore, in order to support this in an non-breaking way, we would need to start templating/have two versions of the framework, so that we have a androidx version of the codebase and a non-androidx version of the codebase.
   
   The good news is, if the library is using version 28 of the support libs... then they can easily be upgraded to androidx 1.0.0, as they are [binary equivalent](https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/migrate#prerequisites). However, like dpogue says, they are a lot of unmaintained plugins that will end up breaking.
   
   To me, while this does pose a problem, but I think holding back poses a larger problem. I don't think holding Cordova back because of unmaintained plugins is a good idea. One of the goals of androidx is to improve android reliability by reducing the need to use reflections in the android code, while still being able to support newer features/APIs and remain backwards compatibility just like before. Moving forward, Google is going to be [more strict](https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/02/improving-stability-by-reducing-usage.html) on reflection usage I think. Holding back will put us in a situation where it may become impossible to support newer features as newer API levels are released.


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