Why Android Studio is forcing to use Androidx from Android support library?

Question

Working on a React Native project but out of sudden it stopped working & started giving an error:

Manifest merger failed : Attribute application@appCompo         


        

Answer 1

You mention you are using react-native. As mentioned elsewhere you cannot avoid AndroidX for ever though you may postpone it.

In react-native particularly it was difficult to convert because gradle does not jetify source files except for during the original refactor via Android Studio, and react-native ships it's native code as source files.

Now you may simply use the 'jetifier' tool though, and after installing it and running it the first time add npx jetify in the postinstall of your package.json for persistent jetification across node module installs/updates.

Then you should be able to successfully convert your app to AndroidX, start depending on new AndroidX library versions but still use libraries that have not converted. You will be better prepared for react-native 0.60 which will be AndroidX

If you must postpone AndroidX and are using react-native, for react-native 0.59 at least, you may also use the jetifier tool in reverse to modify source references in node_modules from androidx to the compat references.