RxJava 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch to be more performant, lower overhead (memory and cpu) and to natively implement the Reactive-Streams specification in its new Flowable type. The library still supports Java 6+ and is considered a 4th generation reactive library.

There have been hundreds of PRs and large amounts of changes compared to the 1.x version. The two are binary-incompatible but their distinct maven coordinates (io.reactivex.rxjava2:rxjava:2.0.0-RC1) allow them to co-exist. You can use the rxjava2-interop library to convert between 1.x and 2.x types.

Please refer to the wiki page about the differences between the two major versions.

Converting the companion libraries is an ongoing effort. For now, see the rxjava2-extensions project that contains the port of the RxJavaMath features. Note that most companion libraries of RxJava are currently not set up properly for release (the signing keys are missing from the CI release process) and is unknown if and when they will have their own 2.x release branch.

I'd like to thank for the contributions of the following community members (in LIFO commit-merge order):

@davidmoten, @JakeWharton, @vanniktech, @dimitar-asenov, @artem-zinnatullin, @bobvanderlinden, @DmitriyZaitsev, @zsxwing, @bcorne, @stevegury, @benjchristensen, @stealthcode, @adam-arold and @abersnaze.

A special thanks goes out to @smaldini, Project-Reactor lead at Pivotal. Our ongoing cooperation lead to the massive improvement of the RxJava 2.x architecture (originally designed in August 2015) by learning from and building upon the results of the Reactive-Streams-Commons research project.