AGP 7.0: Next major release for the Android Gradle plugin
Blog post from Google Cloud
The release of Android Studio Arctic Fox (2020.3.1) and Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) version 7.0.0-alpha01 introduces a new versioning scheme adopting semantic versioning principles, ensuring that only major version changes break API compatibility. This aligns AGP's versioning with Gradle's, skipping versions 5 and 6, and indicates that AGP 7.x is designed to work with Gradle 7.x APIs, though not guaranteed for Gradle 8.x. The minimum Java version requirement is changing to Java 11 starting with AGP 7.0.0-alpha02, allowing developers time to adapt. The release also brings significant API changes, such as the removal of onVariants, onProperties, and onVariantProperties blocks, replaced by beforeVariants and onVariants in the androidComponents block, requiring migration by plugin authors to ensure compatibility with the stable version of AGP 7.0.0.