The day Google decided to shake the React Native Community

Google is known for its drastically and very fast-breaking changes on their versions of Android, meaning that your app could stop working by doing nothing but just existing.

This could be caused by a maven library that was deprecated and removed from their repository or an indirect dependency that now requires an X version which conflicts with one of your other dependencies. One way or another it’s really tedious to deal with these kinds of situations. Ex:

Let’s say that your team is planning to make a release during this week with a bunch of bug-fixes + some neat new features that the team has been working on for days, and all of the sudden the project just stops building, therefore you need to spend time fixing something that you initially did not break + time testing that the whole app is still working as intended.

Anyways, these are the things that Android developers accept because, in the end, we cannot fully control our indirect dependencies + external repository changes.

In order to solve this kind of situations you normally inject a dependency repository into your conflicting dependency or force a specific version of an android dependency so there are no more conflicts on your direct or indirect dependencies.

These kinds of issues don’t really take that long to be solved because they’re caused by one single dependency, maybe two in a bad day. But one day, something else happened.

It was June 17th, 2019, Android released their new package names for their DEPRECATED support libraries + other tools inside AndroidX, and…

What this release basically did is that if you used to import a library import android.support.annotation.*; it should now be…