The path to DX deprecation

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager on Android

Back in 2017, we released D8, a new faster dexing compiler to replace DX, producing smaller APKs. In April 2018, we announced D8 as the default option in Android Studio 3.1.

In that announcement, we laid out 3 phases to deprecate DX and we are now entering phase 2:

“Once we've seen a six month window without major regressions from DX to D8, we'll enter the second phase. This phase will last for a year, and is intended to ensure that even complex projects have lots of time to migrate. During this phase, we'll keep DX available, but we'll treat it as fully deprecated; we won't be fixing any issues.”

If you haven’t already, it is now the time to migrate to D8 (see details in the previous post). As always, if you encounter issues, please do let us know!

Next steps

On Feb 1st, 2021, we’ll move to step 3, removing DX fully from Android Studio and any other build environments.

Note: This post is about DX only (and does not include shrinking tools)