Question

I code mostly in Java and use Maven for all of my projects. I do really love using Maven since it is easy to download the sources and documentations, and, more importantly, I don’t need to keep the copy of the external libraries under my project source code folders.

I have started to develop an Android application and I found that the Android plugin for eclipse are terribly good. However, all provided examples are not maven projects so I do not know whether, if I use maven, I would still get all the functionalities from the Android plugin or whether there is any drawback from using Maven.

So the questions are:

1. Do all features from Android plugin for eclipse still work?
2. Is it going to be more difficult than using the normal build (I believe it is Ant but not certain)
3. Any other drawbacks, e.g. the file size of the final application (Maven tends to bundle a lot of things together) or the difficulties of getting the latest libraries on maven repository (which is probably differnt for Android).

Please do not point to this maven support for android projects?

I would like an answer from experience developers. I already know that it is possible to use maven for an Android app. All I need to know is whether I should use it.

Answer 1

My teams current task is to develop an Android app. Since it is a small app and also some kind of prototype we decided to evaluate Maven and the Android Eclipse plugin.

In short:
After two developers spent three days, we were not able to gain the Android Eclipse plugin functionalities in our Maven project.

• The R class was not updated according to our resources
• We were not able to start the application directly from within Eclipse in the emulator and/or an attached device

Because of these issues which impeded our development sincerely we decided to develop the app without Maven.
But if any of you knows how to fix these issues I would love to hear a solution!