Labels

Android AGP 8.x.x -> 9.0.0 Deprecations / Config Changes

Otter 3 Project Config


 Just a short post for those upgrading their Android project/s.

With the release of Android Studio Otter 3 on January 15th, we also got an AGP upgrade to 9.0.0

Important Note

As well as the deprecations, there seem to be a bunch of issues with AGP 9.

If you want to start a new KMP project, please see my older post that explains how to create a project using a downloadable web template (official). This also contains a link to a PL coding video explaining how to update existing projects.

Other useful links:



This blog post gives one persons experience and workarounds.

✨ AI Blog Post Summary

  • Built-in Kotlin Support: AGP 9.0 now has native Kotlin support. You no longer need to apply the kotlin-android plugin; instead, you should remove it to avoid conflicts.
  • New Android-KMP Plugin: A new, specialized plugin (com.android.kotlin.multiplatform.library) is introduced for KMP library modules. This replaces the old way of applying the android-library plugin alongside KMP.
  • Module Restructuring: To avoid plugin conflicts, it is recommended to extract the Android-specific app entry point into its own separate module (e.g., :androidApp), while keeping shared logic in a KMP library module.
  • Removal of Build Types in KMP: A major breaking change is that build types (like debug and release) are no longer supported directly within KMP library modules. This affects BuildConfig and manifest placeholders, requiring developers to refactor how they handle build-specific logic (e.g., using Dependency Injection).
  • Configuration Changes: The android.kotlinOptions and kotlin.sourceSets DSLs require updates or migration to the new AGP 9.0 structure.

In short, the guide warns that while the migration simplifies the build setup in the long run, it requires significant refactoring of how Android-specific KMP code and build configurations are handled.

Deprecations

Updating to this will give you a bunch of deprecation warnings:

In this case, I'm updating from "8.13.2" to "9.0.0".

It does warn you about these during the upgrade process.


It will also remind you again after the upgrade is complete:

Changes

So I'll quickly note what we should do to get rid of the warnings when you build/run your project:

build.gradle.kts plugins

From project, comment out / remove this:

    alias(libs.plugins.android.application) apply false
//    alias(libs.plugins.kotlin.android) apply false
    alias(libs.plugins.kotlin.compose) apply false

From app, comment out / remove this:

    alias(libs.plugins.android.application)
//    alias(libs.plugins.kotlin.android)
    alias(libs.plugins.kotlin.compose)

gradle.properties

We can remove all of these I have commented out:

android.nonTransitiveRClass=true
#android.defaults.buildfeatures.resvalues=true
#android.sdk.defaultTargetSdkToCompileSdkIfUnset=false
#android.enableAppCompileTimeRClass=false
#android.usesSdkInManifest.disallowed=false
android.uniquePackageNames=false
android.dependency.useConstraints=true
android.r8.strictFullModeForKeepRules=false
#android.r8.optimizedResourceShrinking=false
#android.builtInKotlin=false
#android.newDsl=false
Creating a new project, this is now the default (I've removed all the commented out lines):
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
android.useAndroidX=true
kotlin.code.style=official
android.nonTransitiveRClass=true
This is far smaller than previous projects.

libs.versions.toml

We can remove the kotlin-android as this is now in all projects by default.

[plugins]
android-application = { id = "com.android.application", version.ref = "agp" }
#kotlin-android = { id = "org.jetbrains.kotlin.android", version.ref = "kotlin" }
kotlin-compose = { id = "org.jetbrains.kotlin.plugin.compose", version.ref = "kotlin" }

Other Points of Interest

gradle-wrapper.properties

We can upgrade our gradle version to 9.3:

distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-9.3.0-bin.zip

Creating a new project, I noticed it added a new value to my config - distributionSha256Sum. I haven't looked into this yet, but I think it's good to point this out.

#Tue Jan 20 19:57:52 JST 2026
distributionBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
distributionPath=wrapper/dists
distributionSha256Sum=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-9.1.0-bin.zip
networkTimeout=10000
validateDistributionUrl=true
zipStoreBase=GRADLE_USER_HOME
zipStorePath=wrapper/dists

build.gradle.kts

Still defaults to Java 11. I have been using Java 21 for most of my projects for a while now with no apparent issues. This should, hopefully, provide some performance benefits. I've not looked too deeply in to this.

compileOptions {
    sourceCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_11
    targetCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_11
}

I also remove buildFeatures compose as I haven't found a reason to keep this:

    compileOptions {
        sourceCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_21
        targetCompatibility = JavaVersion.VERSION_21
    }
//    buildFeatures {
//        compose = true
//    }


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts