January 28, 2020.
Akka 2.5.x is backwards binary compatible with previous 2.4.x versions (exceptions listed below). This means that the new JARs are a drop-in replacement for the old one (but not the other way around) as long as your build does not enable the inliner (Scala-only restriction). It should be noted that Scala 2.12.x is is not binary compatible with Scala 2.11.x, which means that Akka’s binary compatibility property only holds between versions that were built for a given Scala version—akka-actor_2.12-2.5.0.jar is compatible with akka-actor_2.12-2.4.17.jar but not with akka-actor_2.11-2.4.17.jar.