The ABCs of Distributing Android Libraries

Bintray’s central repositories, JCenter and Conan-Center, are binary hubs for public OSS Maven and Conan (C++) packages respectively. They offer a great channel to distribute your public OSS packages. Having been around for a while, JCenter has become one of the most comprehensive sources for public OSS Maven packages, and is the channel-of-choice for many Maven projects. So we weren’t surprised to discover this blog post that describes how easy it is to distribute Android libraries through Bintray and JCenter.

Distributing Android libraries (or any other Maven package for that matter) through JCenter has its advantages. As one of the most popular Maven hubs, it exposes your package to a huge audience, and yet, you retain full ownership and can control how your package evolves. Basically, you upload your package to one of your public Maven repositories and ask for it to be included in JCenter. Once approved by the Bintray team, your package will be searchable on JCenter and freely available for download. You can learn about the details in the blog or look it up in the Bintray User Manual.

So if you’re ready to give your package world-wide fame, go ahead and open an account on Bintray. Bear in mind that since JCenter is a curated repository with trusted content, you need to be on a fully registered OSS or Premium account (as opposed to being on a trial) before you can link your package.

To start with a free OSS account, you can sign up here.

If you’re ready to go Premium (Pro or Enterprise), go here.

And if you want the full Enterprise experience, without committing to it yet, you can start a free trial (just remember to switch to an OSS or Premium account if you want to use JCenter).