What client engine is recommended for Android and why? And what Android versions support the CIO engine? There's conflicting information on that, here from a GitHub issue:

Unfortunately, the CIO engine supports only API level 24 or higher(Android >= 8.0)

API level 24 is Android 7 though 🤔

Hi @Marc Knaup. You could use

Android

,

OkHttp

or

CIO

based engines on your Android.

Yes I know about the three options but I'd like a way to decide for which one to use. If they are all almost the same then why two for Android in the first place? :) And I don't know what Android version I need for running CIO properly. And whether CIO has any benefits or downsides.

You need API level 24. CIO is fully on coroutines. Android and OkHttp use blocking network instead

Ah okay thank you. So Android 7 is fine, not Android 8 like it says on GitHub and here in Slack?

Yep

@Marc Knaup unless that changed very recently,

CIO

also does not support HTTP/2

So I guess

Android

engine is most preferable for now as it supports HTTP/2 and doesn't require an additional library bundled with the app?

Android is based on

URLConnection

.

yes, so no external lib 🙂 There is no guidance on how to decide for an engine, so I need to collect information to be able to make that decision 🙂

Usually you use OkHttp over the vanilla Android thing because of its far better API and management of common network errors, but I don’t know how that applies to ktor as you’re behind the same API in this case. I don’t know what the other advantages of OkHttp are, but I’m pretty sure there are some

Yup, that's my problem - there's no information on stuff like that 😅