The <documentation> says that the latest supported...

# compose-desktop

[Michael Paus]

The documentation says that the latest supported AGP version is 8.2 but when I try to use it (or 8.2.0) in my desktop project, I just get an UnknownPluginException error message. I am currently using 8.1.0 with Kotlin 1.9.20 and Compose 1.5.10. So, what is the actual status of AGP?

[Chrimaeon]

It’s only rc02
https://maven.google.com/web/m_index.html#com.android.tools.build:gradle:8.2.0-rc02

[Casey Brooks]

Android seems to be in a really strange kind of limbo right now. I’ve been running into so many compatibility issues lately trying to get the latest versions of Gradle, AGP, SDK 34, and Intellij all working together.

It’s really annoying that Compose and all the other Androidx libs seem to have moved on to SDK 34, but none of the other build tooling has a stable version that supports it

[Michael Paus]

@Chrimaeon Not really:

The project is using an incompatible version (AGP 8.2.0-rc02) of the Android Gradle plugin. Latest supported version is AGP 8.1.0

[Chrimaeon]

yeah, what android studio version are you using. a certion Android studio version is compatible with a certain gradle plugin. (Not really, but that’s what the waring tries to tell you). as 8.2 is not released I guess you need a beta version of Android Studio. It’s Hedgehog at the moment. https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose/designsystems/material3

[Michael Paus]

I am not using AndroidStudio at all. I am using IntelliJ. The latest EAP version.

[Chrimaeon]

ah, well, then you cannot use it yet. It’s a chicken-egg problem with the plugin and the IntelliJ Version. they cannot create an intelliJ version compatible with the gradle plugin until it is released.

[Chrimaeon]

It’s discussed in a channel over here. I guess if you search for the issue in this workspace you’d get a description.

[Michael Paus]

I guess we should give the dust some time to settle.

[Chrimaeon]

🙂

[Casey Brooks]

Yup, that’s the problem. Intellij’s Android plugin is always behind Android Studio, and in this case it seems to be quite far behind. It normally takes a couple AGP releases for the latest Android features to become available in Intellij, but it seems like it’s taking exceptionally long this time. The solution isn’t a newer version of AGP, but actually an older one, because it takes time for newer versions to be compatible with Intellij.

I think the new Intellij UI is definitely a major factor here which is making things take longer than normal. And SDK 34 (Android 14) seems to also be significant, as many of the latest Androidx libraries require a target SDK 34 (which is not yet supported by Intellij), and I don’t recall that being a normal thing with previous releases. This comes alongside the new AGP versioning strategy to keep versions related to Gradle. Basically, all together things are just not playing very nicely with each other outside of Android Studio yet. It’s frustrating, and I don’t know if there’s an expected time when things will be better. But to use the latest Android goodies, you’ll probably need to switch to Android Studio instead.

[Michael Paus]

Fortunately, this is the desktop channel here and I do not really need the AGP. Basically I only support the Android version of my desktop app to show that it is possible 😉.

[ephemient]

you don't need to use the latest AGP to use the latest Android SDK (there is a warning in earlier versions of AGP when you do that, but they've removed it as its misleading)