Introducing Jetpack on GitHub

Interested in looking at the source code for or contributing to Jetpack libraries, and you like Github? We have something for you.

In 2018, Jetpack library development moved to the Android Open Source Project to increase transparency and enable external contributions. Since then, we’ve continued to invest in quality-of-life improvements for Jetpack contributors while moving more work-in-progress changes, feature discussions, and bugs to publicly-visible components. We have even seen dedicated external developers learn the workflow and contribute patches; however, we wanted to explore ways to make the process easier and more developer-friendly.

Today, we are beginning a project to meet developers where they are: GitHub.

This is an early-stage effort that we hope will make it easier to explore, experiment with, and contribute to the Jetpack libraries. We are starting small, with contributions encouraged for Room and WorkManager and support for developing in Mac OS and Linux environments via Android Studio.

Contribution workflow

To get started with Jetpack development, start by forking the AndroidX/androidx repository, as you would for any other GitHub project, and then cloning your fork locally:

git clone git@github.com:<username>/androidx.git .

Next, refer to our GitHub CONTRIBUTING file for details on automatically configuring a suitable Android Studio development environment, making and validating changes, and sending a pull request for review and pre-submit approval.

Note that we are currently accepting GitHub pull requests for Room and WorkManager. Contributions to other libraries are still encouraged through the standard AOSP Jetpack workflow detailed here.

Providing feedback

While the scope of our GitHub exploration is still quite limited, we encourage developers to file feature requests and bugs against the Jetpack > Infrastructure > GitHub component of our public AOSP issue tracker.