Can we use Optionals in Android programming?

Question

I have been reading about the Optional type in Java 8. I want to implement in some of my Android code.

But does the Dalvik machine for the latest versions of Android

Answer 1

I don't think you can do it now or in near future. As you can see in here Android start listing Java 7 as a requirement since Android 5.0 that was released at Nov 2014.
That is 3 years after Java 7 first release, so maybe we can use Java 8 from 2017 ;)

On another note you can use lambda using retrolambda to support lambda in Android dev which is really nice.

Answer 2

You can use StreamSupport lib which adds support for the new Streams API and as a side effect it has Optional.

For gradle use:

compile "net.sourceforge.streamsupport:streamsupport:1.5.1"

Answer 3

Yes. But only on API level 24 / Nougat (in current time of writing).

For pre-Nougat, you may opt to these libraries:

• Options (https://github.com/tomaszpolanski/Options)
• Arrow (https://github.com/android10/arrow)
• StreamSupport (https://github.com/streamsupport/streamsupport)
• Optional (https://github.com/MrHadiSatrio/Optional)
• Guava (https://github.com/google/guava)