Gradle build improvements

ptomato commented 10 months ago

Description

Some attempts to speed up and solve warnings in the Gradle build.

Upgrades Gradle from 7.4 to 7.6 (I didn't test much with 8.x but it looks like we use several features deprecated in 8.0 so I didn't pursue it)
Fix deprecations that Gradle warns about
Remove Jetifier from the build. Android Studio claims that this will speed up the build and that no dependencies need Jetifier. I don't really know how trustworthy that is, so please double-check this.

Related Pull Requests

NativeScript/android-dts-generator#77 (note: once this is merged, I'll send another PR updating the Git submodule and making a change to remove the other generators' copyJarToBuildTools tasks for the same reason)

Does your pull request have unit tests?

No tests. All of the changes are to the build system.

ptomato commented 10 months ago

Hmm, the test task failed because of this:

 > Task :deletePreviousResultXml FAILED
Removing previous android_unit_test_results.xml

I get this error occasionally when running tests locally, even without this upgrade. I'm not sure what to do about it in this case.

edusperoni commented 9 months ago

@triniwiz can you take a look at this? Does disabling the jettifier impact existing apps or is it only on the runtime build?

triniwiz commented 9 months ago

@edusperoni I recall the reason for the flag was as follows but I have a feeling some may have still use old support libs in their app

When this flag is set to true, the Android plugin automatically migrates existing third-party libraries to use AndroidX dependencies by rewriting their binaries. The flag is false by default if it is not specified.

ptomato commented 9 months ago

Maybe if it's not clear whether Jetifier has any effect on apps or just the runtime, I should just drop that commit from this PR?

triniwiz commented 9 months ago

@ptomato flutter and rn seem to still have it enabled so keeping it for now, we can remove it in the next major version.

NativeScript / android