I am pleased to announce that Spring for Android 2.0.0.M2 is now available in the Spring milestone repository. Highlights include:

• Support for the Android port of HttpClient 4.3 via HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory
• Support for HttpClient 4.0 included with Android is now deprecated but will remain available through HttpComponentsAndroidClientHttpRequestFactory.
• HTTP PATCH support in RestTemplate
• The type conversion package from Spring Core is now available in Spring for Android Core.
• Many improvements and fixes from Spring 3.2 are now merged into Spring for Android to bring baseline compatibility to Spring 3.2, while certain RestTemplate features from Spring 4.1 have been included to support the new HttpClient.
• Other bug fixes and improvements

HttpClient 4.3

If HttpClient 4.3 for Android is available on the classpath it will be configured as the default HTTP client. Include the following dependency in your build.gradle to utilize the new HttpClient.

dependencies {
    compile 'org.apache.httpcomponents:httpclient-android:4.3.5'
}

Minimum Version

The minimum supported version is Android 2.2 (API level 8), however it now accounts for 0.5% of Android devices on the Android developer Dashboards. We recommend Android 2.3 as a minimum target for new apps, as third-party libraries such as Jackson 2.4 and OkHttp require Android 2.3 and newer.

Conclusion

For a complete list of changes, see the Release Notes in JIRA. The reference documentation has also been updated to cover the new features.

Thanks again to everyone that has contributed to the release! Please try this new milestone and report any problems in JIRA or on GitHub.