Titanium SDK 5.0.0 Ant Deprecation: Timeline Unresolved

Answer – When will Ant disappear?

As of Titanium SDK 5.0.0 Ant is still fully supported and will build projects without errors. The SDK team has not published an official end‑of‑life date. Community consensus suggests Ant will be phased out in the next major release (SDK 6.0), with the 5.x line keeping Ant support for the foreseeable future (5.1/5.2 may drop it).

Likely Explanation

• Gradle is positioned as the default Android build system for new projects.
• Ant support will be gradually reduced, but no concrete schedule exists.
• Custom Ant targets that the migration script cannot translate will remain a manual maintenance burden.

Minimal Steps for Your Project

1. Verify current Ant support

   ti --version
   ti build --log-level debug
   

   This confirms that Ant is still being invoked and that the build succeeds.
2. Run the migration tool (if you plan to move to Gradle)

   ti migrate:gradle
   

   The script generates a build.gradle and related files, but it does not handle custom Ant targets.
3. Review custom targets
   • Search your build.xml for <target> elements that are not part of the default Android build flow.
   • Translate those targets manually into Gradle tasks (e.g., task custom(type: Exec) { ... }).
   • Validate the Gradle build with ti build --platform android --build-type debug.
4. Plan a phased migration
   • Keep Ant for the next 5.x releases if you cannot refactor immediately.
   • Set a target SDK version (e.g., 6.0) for when you will drop Ant entirely.
   • Use CI to run both Ant and Gradle builds to catch regressions early.

Missing Diagnostic Detail

Does your project contain custom Ant targets that the migration script cannot translate automatically? If so, the recommendation to migrate now may need to be postponed until you can manually port those tasks to Gradle.