Many have complained...and with good reason... for osmdroid's relatively ancient configuration for android build technologies. Including but not limited to:

• Android Gradle Plugin (AGP)
• Android Support libraries
• Gradle build system
• Android studio support

The primary reasons for not upgrading where the following

• We publish to oss.sonatype.org....i.e. maven central, which has the following requirements
• Javadocs and source jars
• Near fully populated POMs
• GPG digital signatures on everything above
• Hashes on everything above

In addition, osmdroid has a few other unique requirements

• We have javadocs with extra content in them (doc-files)
• Probably others

I've spent several long nights trying to get the latest AGP + Gradle to do everything we need it to do and failed. However...there is a happy story here. Most of the build tech that was previously in gradle fury was written in plain java so I was able to come up with a configuration and build process to satisfy all our requirements.

The release process, assuming this is merged, is follows:

• create a master key for encrypting passwords, just like before
• encrypt your nexus password, just like before and store in local.properties
• update an version numbers as needed in gradle.properties, just like before
• git comment, just like before
• release.bat
• update an version numbers as needed in gradle.properties, just like before
• git comment, just like before
• upload the distribution to github releases, just like before

What's in release.bat?

• gradlew clean build publishToMavenLocal
• build our release helper (with maven)
• run the release helper

What does the release helper do?

• gathers the release artifacts from your local .m2/repository folder
• inject the javadoc stuff
• fix the poms
• sign the artifacts
• hash them
• push to maven central
• build the dist zip

Could the release helper be reworked to be in gradle?

• yes, but that'll be someone else's problem

What open issues are left?

• at least one unit test was disabled, failure caused by unknown reasons
• i recall at least one generated class reference that was disabled, need to revisit it
• lots of warnings caused the build system about deprecated whatevers
• probably more lint errors
• some dependencies in the main app are flagged by android studio as incompatible but it seems to build ok?
• could use some help testing the apks with connectedCheck
• add back the gradle task to encrypt passwords and to generate a master key
• third party + Google wrapper app?

Any other changes?

• Gradle site support was dropped
• Any direct references to gradle fury dropped