Android Studio 3.1 - What is 'Embedded Maven Repository'

Question

Android Studio 3.1 has been released recently, it has a setting in the Gradle > Android Studio path named Enable embedded Maven repository, what does that do? should it be enabled or not?

Answer 1

Android Studio ships with a local mirror of its maven repository which contains basic dependencies required for building (e.g. the android gradle plugin, apksigner,...). The main purpose seems to be to make opening and building of (new) projects faster by using the local repo instead of downloading the dependencies from the online repo. So unless you have a slow or metered (or even no) internet connection I don't see any reason to enable it.

You can read some more about it here: https://commonsware.com/blog/2017/10/30/curious-case-missing-google.html and in the linked issue: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/68272783