How does JDK 7's support termination affect Android development

Question

Oracle has announced that they stop the official updates for JRE 7 and JDK 7.

As much as I know, Google doesn\'t say anything about JDK 8, I guess the recom

Answer 1

It looks like Google doesn't officially support the JDK 8 for Android development. See paxdiablo's answer.

But let me add some thoughts.

I wanted to try using the JDK 8 anyway. So I downloaded and installed it, and used it (and Apache Ant) to build a simple Android app.

The app doesn't use any features which are new to Java 8, such as lambdas. In addition, Ant passed a parameter to javac asking it to emit bytecode compatible with older JREs.

The app compiled fine.

The app requires that I root my phone before running it. I haven't done so yet, and haven't tested the app yet either.

Please ping me with a comment in a few weeks. Ask me to update this answer and to let you know whether or not the app worked.

Answer 2

The Google Android development page and, from there, the pre-requisites page list JDK7 as a requirement.

This has nothing to do with Oracle's JRE since the code made during Android development is never meant to run on that JRE - it's supposed to be turned into Dalvik bytecode and run under Android.

So the security concerns of Oracle's JRE are not really at issue here. Google supports JDK7 (insomuch as it pertains to Android development) so that's what you should be using, pending a clear statement of intent from Google.