Future of Java 8 Language Feature Support on Android

At Google, we always try to do the right thing. Sometimes this means adjusting our plans. We know how much our Android developer community cares about good support for Java 8 language features, and we're changing the way we support them.

We've decided to add support for Java 8 language features directly into the current javac and dx set of tools, and deprecate the Jack toolchain. With this new direction, existing tools and plugins dependent on the Java class file format should continue to work. Moving forward, Java 8 language features will be natively supported by the Android build system. We're aiming to launch this as part of Android Studio in the coming weeks, and we wanted to share this decision early with you.

We initially tested adding Java 8 support via the Jack toolchain. Over time, we realized the cost of switching to Jack was too high for our community when we considered the annotation processors, bytecode analyzers and rewriters impacted. Thank you for trying the Jack toolchain and giving us great feedback. You can continue using Jack to build your Java 8 code until we release the new support. Migrating from Jack should require little or no work.

We hope the new plan will pave a smooth path for everybody to take advantage of Java 8 language features on Android. We'll share more details when we release the new support in Android Studio.