Is "AndroidAnnotaions" reliable?

Question

Is "AndroidAnnotations" reliable? I've searched it but couldn't find many articles on it(reviews or tutorials).

I've been considering using this library in my project which already has quite lots of users. Before adopting it, I need a good reputation on it. So my concerns mainly are,

• Are there famous products using this library?
• Can I say it's stable enough to adopt it for my big project?
• Will it be maintained well? (bug fixes, etc)

Thanks in advance.

Krystakrystal

Timely uses AndroidAnnotations, listed in the open source licenses. It's a popular app and was acquired by Google. – Silky

Answer 1

I am the lead developer of AndroidAnnotations. Let's answer your questions:

Can you rely on AndroidAnnotations?

I think so. AndroidAnnotations is a compile time framework which generates code. The generated code is readable java code, which means that if you need to understand what happens, you can. No magic happening at runtime => you are in control.

We try to maintain a list of external articles / tutorials here.

Are there famous products using this library?

Let's be honest: I don't know. Matthias Kaeppler from Qype talked about AndroidAnnotations at DroidCon London 2011. The frontpage lists the applications that we know for sure are using it. I know there are way more people using it because they ask for enhancements and report bugs, but they usually don't let us know when they publish an app. And of course, the idea of "writing clean and maintainable Android code" is not yet very common in the Android community.

Can I say it's stable enough to adopt it for my big project?

We are using it in our own apps, and we find it perfectly stable. So I would answer yes, but I think you should just try it :-) . Download the 2.2 RC2 (will be released stable soon), follow the instructions and see for yourself. You can do progressive enhancement, and start enhancing only one or two activities. See how it fits you, and let us know if anything goes wrong. And if you do release an app with AndroidAnnotations on the Android market, please let us know, we'll update the front page.

Will AndroidAnnotations be maintained?

Yes, it will. Although it started as a personal project, AndroidAnnotations is now sponsored by a company, eBusiness Information. This company employs people (including me) to work on AndroidAnnotations, with the aim of making it a major Open Source Android framework.

As you can see here and there, we are adding a lot of new features for the 2.2 release. And you won't find a lot of open Defects in the issues, because we concentrate on fixing any bug before adding new features.

Photosensitive

How is it going in 2014? Is it still alive? – Taxaceous

It is still alive and actively developed, just check out the activity on GitHub. – Fishery

How come we hear so little about AA ? All the forum activities are quite old. Is it because there is some alternative out there (except for Dagger) that eclipsed AA ? – Ebonyeboracum

Dagger is not an alternative to AA actually. Dagger is "just" a dependency injector (and does a better job on that part than AA), however it does not have Android-related resource injection, event handling, etc. What forums are inactive? We always got new questions here, and the GitHub project is quiet active. BTW, i would have been notified about your question, if you would have posted in the mailing list instead on a 3 years old SO question. :) – Fishery