Android buildscript repositories: jcenter VS mavencentral

Question

The last time I used Android Studio, it generated .gradle files with mavencentral() buildscript repositories whereas now there\'s jcenter()

Answer 1

I was wondering the same, and I don't have a definitive answer but figured it might be worth sharing what (little) I'd learned. I found mention of the move from Maven Central to JCenter within one issue on Google Code, but didn't spot details about exactly when this happened - couldn't find mention in the recent changes list for Android Studio.

From reading up on JCenter, it is the repository behind Bintray, from the company JFrog (who I've come across before, and I guess that's where the 'J' comes from). According to the Bintray blog, Bintray is a superset of Maven Central, so if that's true there shouldn't be issues with missing dependencies, but I guess it's going to depend on exactly what you're using in your projects - you could always directly check the repos as both have nice easily-searchable websites. So for who maintains these repos, as best I know, it's up to the producers of the dependencies to add their dependencies to each repo, and up to the repo owner just to maintain the service.

In terms of when to switch it is difficult to work out. AOSP is still using Maven Central I think (from looking in Templates for New Android Application), but then that template is also still using a very old Gradle version (0.4) as well. There's a couple of issues about others having issues with dependencies from jcenter, but not really a lot reported, and it is possible that Google will switch again to some other repo before releasing AS final. If Maven Central is still working fine for you for now you could hold off switching until then especially if you're building large commercial solutions.