Some years ago, I worked on one of my first Android apps, using Kotlin targetting SDK 24. It did a b...

# android

[Travis Griggs]

Some years ago, I worked on one of my first Android apps, using Kotlin targetting SDK 24. It did a bit with time and at the time com.jakewharton.threetenabp
seemed the best approach to get a modernish/capable ability to do lots of things with time (Instant, etc).

I'm doing a redone "modern" greenfield version of this app, targetting SDK >= 28. Given that, what the best/idiomatic way of modeling datetimes in an Android app now? Is java.util.Date basically what I want now? or something else?

[itnoles]

just use Instant

[Travis Griggs]

(and sorry "not kotlin")

[psh]

You could go with Kotlinx.Datetime and keep your options open for moving the code multiplatform in the future.

[Albert Chang]

https://developer.android.com/studio/write/java8-support#library-desugaring

[Colton Idle]

I'd use java8 date time apis. You don't even have to do any sort of desugaring setup if you target something sorta recent (IIRC)

[Albert Chang]

Note that what matters is mim sdk version, not target sdk version. If the min sdk version is < 26, you need to use desugaring.

[Albert Chang]

Also note that kotlinx.datetime uses java.time API under the hood on JVM, so you may still need to enable desugaring depending on min sdk version.