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Google re-branded the support Android libraries to AndroidX




It is important to note, you cannot mix AppCompat and Jetpack in the same project. You must convert everything to use Jetpack if you want to upgrade.

The support library artifacts are being deprecated and all future development is going into AndroidX, so there's no avoiding this migration.

Alan Viverette sums this up nicely:
“There won’t be a 29.0.0, so Android Q APIs will only be in AndroidX”

The stable release of 28.0.0 will be the final feature release packaged as android.support. All subsequent feature releases will only be made available as androidx-packaged artifacts.

Below tips will give you a clearer transition path.

The current version of AppCompat (v28.x) is exactly the same as AndroidX (v1.x). In fact, the AppCompat libraries are machine generated by changing maven coordinates and package names of the AndroidX codebase.

For example, android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity is now androidx.appcompat.app.AppCompatActivity

For a complete listing of mappings from 28.0.0-alpha1 (android.support) to 1.0.0-alpha1 (androidx).
https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/migrate#artifact_mappings

Steps to use AndroidX in new project:

You need to set the compile SDK to Android 9.0 (API level 28) or higher and set both of the following Android Gradle plugin flags to true in your gradle.properties file.

android.useAndroidX: When set to true, the Android plugin uses the appropriate AndroidX library instead of a Support Library. The flag is false by default if it is not specified.
android.enableJetifier: When set to true, the Android plugin automatically migrates existing third-party libraries to use AndroidX by rewriting their binaries. The flag is false by default if it is not specified.

Steps to migrate your existing project to androidX


1. Upgrade your app to latest Support libs

2. Migrate an existing project using Android Studio
With Android Studio 3.2 and higher, you can quickly migrate an existing project to use AndroidX by selecting
Refactor > Migrate to AndroidX from the menu bar.

3. If you have any Maven dependencies that have not been migrated to the AndroidX namespace, the Android Studio build system also migrates those dependencies for you when you set the following two flags to true in your gradle.properties file:

android.useAndroidX=true
android.enableJetifier=true

To migrate an existing project that does not use any third-party libraries with dependencies that need converting,
you can set the android.useAndroidX flag to true &
android.enableJetifier flag to false.

If you depend on a library that references the older Support Library, Android Studio will update that library to reference androidx instead via dependency translation. Dependency translation is automatically applied by the Android Gradle Plugin 3.2.0-alpha14, which rewrites bytecode and resources of JAR and AAR dependencies (and transitive dependencies) to reference the new androidx-packaged classes and artifacts.

Challenges:

Butter Knife. It generates classes that contains references to support annotations (e.g. android.support.annotation.UiThread). These imports cannot be jetified to AndroidX (since it's source code), so you'll get compiler errors instead.

Thankfully, they have versions that support AndroidX now (many thanks to Square for making AndroidX-friendly artifacts)

You will have to manually migrate in case of errors.

So please update your third-party libraries before migrating to AndroidX

References:

https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/migrate#migrate



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