Bintray

» see bintray.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

JFrog published the notice on 3 February 2021, under a headline that treated four products as one piece of housekeeping. "To streamline the productivity of the JFrog Platform we will be sunsetting Bintray, GoCenter, and ChartCenter services on May 1st, 2021." Hacker News took it at 134 points and 31 comments the same day, most of them people working out what their build files were going to do about it.

Bintray had been announced on 15 January 2013 and described itself in the language of its moment: "a social service for developers to publish, download, store, promote, and share open source software packages." The earliest version in the archive dates from 8 April 2013, and it keeps score in the header. 618 repositories, 51,372 packages served, 4,978 members. The same capture carries a line above the search box reading "An undefined error has occurred." The platform was three months old.

Android Studio's project templates put jcenter() into every new build.gradle for years, so the repository arrived in projects whose authors had never read its name. I have opened plenty of those files. The line sits in the dependency block under repositories and explains nothing about itself. Until the week it broke there was no reason to ask whose servers were answering.

The wind-down ran on published dates. Submissions to JCenter closed on 31 March 2021. Brown-outs were scheduled for 12 and 26 April so that builds would start failing while somebody was awake to notice. On 1 May the distribution service, the account administration, the web UI and the REST API went together.

~ the chronicle ~

~ a million repositories ~

Gradle put a number on the exposure two days after the announcement: "We've found over a million Git repositories on GitHub that use JCenter with Gradle." The same post warned that nobody should expect a one-line fix, because "the transition from JCenter to another repository will be more difficult than simply using a different repository URL." JCenter had been a convenience aggregator. Its contents were about to scatter back to the dozens of places they had come from, and a project with twenty dependencies had twenty small research problems.

Gradle 7.0 deprecated the jcenter() method and took it out of the templates. A default dies when people stop typing it, and that was the moment. Gradle also set a hard horizon for everyone who did nothing, telling users that builds would resolve "until February 1, 2022 without changes. After that date, there are no guarantees."

~ the three year reprieve ~

JFrog then reversed half of it. After the February backlash the company kept JCenter alive as a read-only mirror "to ease the burden on the community," with no end date attached. What a promise like that is worth showed up on 26 November 2022, when the TLS certificate on jcenter.bintray.com expired. Somebody filed the SSL Labs report to Hacker News, where it took three points, and the only comment underneath reads: "Means that I currently cant build a new android project as I am unable to download gradle files." Nobody at JFrog had a line in their job description for renewing a certificate on a product that had been switched off eighteen months earlier.

~ what moved to maven central ~

The real ending was published on schedule too. Brown-outs ran on 30 July 2024 and 5 August, then a full day of darkness from 7 to 8 August. On 15 August 2024 JFrog redirected "all requests to fetch Maven packages from https://jcenter.bintray.com/ to instead request these packages from Maven Central." Point a client at the old host today and it still answers, with 132 KB of repo1.maven.org on the other end.

Bintray's own domain went through the stages faster. Archived captures show the apex serving a sunset page into mid-2021 and answering 410 Gone by 31 October 2022, after which it became a redirect into jfrog.com. The 2021 blog post is still up and still being edited: an update added in January 2026 announced that GoCenter, read-only for five years on the same terms JCenter got, would shut for good on 2 February 2026.

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