The jCenter & Bintray is Shutting Down. Now What? Arun Android

Update — 11th February 2021

To better support the community in this migration, JFrog has extended the JCenter new package versions submission deadline through March 31st 2021. This means that open source library creators who have libraries hosted on JCenter through Bintray can add more versions till March 31st 2021.

For normal Android app developers, the JCenter repository will keep serving packages for 12 months until February 1st 2022. Only the JCenter REST API and UI will be sunsetted on May 1st 2021. This means that if your app uses jcenter maven for any third-party libraries, then your app can be compiled until next year February 2022. So, you should start migrating to other repositories given the time of 1 year now.

If you are an Android developer and have some open source libraries available on jCenter, then you would have received an email from JFrog team today. This emails says that JFrog is shutting down the jCenter, Bintray and some other services starting from May 1, 2021. This merely leaves about 3 months to update your projects regardless if you are open source library developer or not.

The jCenter is the very important part of Android development because a major fraction of Android artifacts are hosted on this site. Android Studio uses the jCenter and Google Maven by default in all the projects created by New Project wizard.

Now, since jCenter is shutting down, what this means for Android developers and how does this deadline of May 1, 2021 affects Android apps globally. I am going to explain this in two perspectives: for normal Android app developers and open source Android library creators.