Today we’ll be making our first release of ExoPlayer 2. This is a major iteration of the library. It includes significant API and architectural changes, as well as many new features.

Q: What happens to ExoPlayer 1?

ExoPlayer 2 will be our focus going forward. All new feature work will be developed in V2 and will not be back-ported. We will however continue to provide bug fixes for V1 for the foreseeable future.

Q: Should I migrate my application, and if so when?

Yes, but when depends on your resources, requirements and attitude to risk. The following information may help to guide your decision:

If V1 does everything you need then there’s little reason to migrate as a matter of urgency. We’d still recommend migrating before Android O, however, since any tuning of ExoPlayer for the O release will be implemented in V2 and is unlikely to be back-ported.

V2 has many new features, and will be the version to which new features are added going forward. If you require these features, you’ll need to migrate.

V1 is tried and tested, and is used in Google’s own applications (e.g. YouTube) to power many millions of playbacks every day. We’re just getting started migrating our applications to V2, and so we’ve yet to validate V2 in the field and at scale to the same extent as V1. We estimate that migrating our applications will take a couple of months.

V2 has a different package name to V1. This makes it possible to ship both versions in a single apk. Doing so and controlling the enabled version using server-side configuration is one option for migrating to V2 whilst at the same time mitigating risk. We intend to adopt this approach for some of our own applications.

Q: I’m trying to migrate, but feature X is no longer supported. What should I do?

This is not intentional, however such cases may occur. This is particularly true where custom extensions to the player are involved. Please file an issue on our issue tracker describing the problem.

Q: I’m developing a new application. Which version should I use?

For new applications we recommend ExoPlayer 2.