Last Updated: February 25, 2016
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541
· prashanthsadasivan

Use Maven. Please.

Using library projects for Android development is too hard. Use maven. For your own sanity.

Organizing Android library projects sucks without maven. The way the tools are set up, you essentially have to download a copy of the code, keep it in your repository somehow (git submodules, or even just a straight copy of the code), and you have to manage updating the libraries if there are significant changes. What's even worse is that your IDE is tightly coupled with the library projects, and has to build each and every library project. If you're using eclipse, you'll see a marked decrease in performance after two or three libraries.

Use Maven. Please.

To include and use libraries, its literally as easy as copying 4 lines into your pom.xml, and importing the changes (press the import button). No messing around with project structures. No need to worry about version control hiccups.

For a good introduction to maven, checkout
Android Bootstrap It takes about fifteen minutes (even less if all you're looking to do is install maven). It also comes with a great starter pom.xml.