For the More Curious: Jetpack, AndroidX, and Architecture Components

The lifecycle-extensions library containing ViewModel is part of Android Jetpack Components. Android Jetpack Components, called Jetpack for short, is a set of libraries created by Google to make various aspects of Android development easier. You can see a listing of all the Jetpack libraries at developer.android.com/​jetpack. You can include any of these libraries in your project by adding the corresponding dependency to your build.gradle file, as you did in this chapter.

Each of the Jetpack libraries is located in a package that starts with androidx. For this reason, you will sometimes hear the terms AndroidX and Jetpack used interchangeably.

You may recall ...

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