Announcement: Deprecation of AndroidX Migration Tooling

[jpobst]

With the launch of Xamarin.Android for .NET 6, the AndroidX Migration tooling is considered deprecated. This tooling was created when AndroidX was introduced to help ease the transition of the ecosystem from the Android Support Libraries to the AndroidX Libraries. Three years later, this transition is largely complete, and nearly all published libraries now support AndroidX.

In Xamarin.Android Classic, the Xamarin.AndroidX.Migration NuGet package was automatically added to any project using AndroidX, which ran the migration process if any Android Support libraries were found. In .NET 6+ (net6.0-android), this package is no longer added automatically to any project.

It is highly recommended that any project being ported to .NET 6+ is updated to only use AndroidX dependencies and Android Support dependencies are removed. In fact, this migration can be done before updating to .NET 6. Eliminating the need for the migration tooling from your application provides a few benefits:

• Faster build times, as the tooling no longer has to run on every build
• Better catching of errors, eliminating a class of errors that would only happen at runtime

Documentation for migrating an existing project to AndroidX can be found here.

While we intend for the deprecated AndroidX Migration tooling to continue working, we will no longer be providing updates or support for it.

Maintainer's Note - Git tag of final source before migration tooling was removed: https://github.com/xamarin/AndroidX/releases/tag/final-migration-tooling.