Google moves AndroidX to AOSP to make development more transparent

According to foreign media reports, Google is trying to provide developers with more transparency by migrating AndroidX (formerly known as the Android Support Library) to the public Android Open Source Project (AOSP). This move means that the process of major feature development and fixes will be more open and changes will be visible.

AndroidX was originally a small collection of libraries designed to provide backward compatibility for new Android platform APIs. Therefore, its development is closely related to the platform, and all work is done in Google's internal branches before being pushed to AOSP. Due to this confidentiality mechanism, it is difficult for developers to contribute to the project. If developers want to do a complete AndroidX build and test, they have to first look at more than 40GB of Android platform code.

Today, the scope of AndroidX has been greatly expanded to include libraries such as AppCompat, Room, and WorkManager. Many of these libraries have achieved high-level abstractions and are no longer associated with new versions of the Android platform. Therefore, more than two years ago, Google began to move AndroidX from the Android platform version to its own independent version control. By migrating AndroidX to AOSP this time, developers will be able to view features and bug fixes in real time.

According to Google, AOSP is a place for experimentation and prototyping. Some new libraries appear in this repository first and are then officially merged into existing libraries, or are deleted before release, or are significantly adjusted during alpha development.