Monday, April 22, 2019

Migrating Android support library Renderscript code to AndroidX

Android is deprecating the Support compatibility libraries  and replacing them with the new AndroidX libraries. To aid in the migration of Android projects using the deprecated support libraries, Android Studio has a Refactor to AndroidX tool. I used that to migrate an old Android project and while it works for the most part, it did not manage to migrate the files using the support renderscript classes; I presume that is because the AndroidX namespace does not have the equivalent renderscript classes.

To complete the migration to AndroidX, I had to do the following by hand:

  1. In all the code files using the android.support.v8.renderscript.* classes, replace them to android.renderscript.* as shown below.

  2. In the app's build.gradle file, upgrade the renderscriptTargetApi level to 17 and turn off the renderscript support mode (renderscriptSupportModeEnabled to false) as shown below.


  3. Save all the files and rebuild the project.

    The project should manage to sync and build successfully.
Note: At the time of writing, Android can only compile android.renderscript.* classes into 32 bit *.bc files. This may be a problem in future as Google Play is moving to apks that support 64 bit files. 

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