Has ndk.thirdparty:googletest and junit-gtest been abandoned?

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mic _

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Apr 30, 2025, 6:20:10 AMApr 30
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The latest release of ndk.thirdparty:googletest that I can find is 1.11.0-beta-1 from December 2021.
And the latest release of the related androidx library junit-gtest is 1.0.0-alpha02 from May 2023.

Are these still being maintained, or has support for them been dropped?

I'm wondering if it's worth it to keep using these libraries, or if I should switch back to building/running my native unit tests from the command line.
It's pretty convenient to be able to run the tests on device directly from Android Studio. But gtest 1.11.0 is pretty old by now, and junit-gtest seems to lack some features, like filtering/skipping tests.

/Michael

Dan Albert

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Apr 30, 2025, 4:44:48 PMApr 30
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They're still marked as beta because we've never had the capacity to support them to my liking. Without infrastructure for automated testing (which we do not have for this), we can't easily auto-update the projects in the ndkports repo, and without that level of automation, we're never going to be able to stay on top of these.

I'm wondering if it's worth it to keep using these libraries, or if I should switch back to building/running my native unit tests from the command line.
It's pretty convenient to be able to run the tests on device directly from Android Studio. But gtest 1.11.0 is pretty old by now, and junit-gtest seems to lack some features, like filtering/skipping tests.

The best advice I can give for the time being is to act on the assumption that the things in ndkports package updates will not get any more frequent than they have been for the past five years. I really hope we can do better at this some day, but you can see from the commit history that we're spread very thin.

I suspect that even if switching back to running your own command line tests is the best solution for you today, it should be easy for you to migrate back to junit-gtest in the future if/when the situation improves.

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