The next major version of NativeScript (version 6) will be switching from the android.support packages to the new androidx namespace. This will be a hard break; as you can only use the support api's or androidx api's; but not both. This is something Google has been implementing for a while; and NativeScript is getting on board to eliminate later issues and give us great support. The awesome developers at Progress have already created a fork of NativeScript; which you can install to test which uses androidx instead of using the support libraries.
Since one of my plugins is affected by the changes; I took a look into what was required to support both the current versions of NativeScript and the new upcoming version of NativeScript.
For any of you who have plugins; this code is what I basically devised.
let androidSupport=null;
if (android.support && android.support.v4) {
androidSupport = android.support.v4;
} else if (global.androidx && global.androidx.core) {
androidSupport = global.androidx.core;
}
Then you can use androidSupport to access the namespace, and it pretty much works the same as what you would access using android.support.v4 or the new androidx.core replacement. Because we used feature detection; this allows us to support both namespaces in the same code base.
So if you have JavaScript or TypeScript code that uses android.support.* then you can use this technique to make your plugin forwards compatible with the next major version of NativeScript while retaining support for the prior versions.
Here is a list of classses that are being moved from android support to androidx: https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/migrate
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