Android Gradle Plugin 3.1.0 (March 2018)

This version of the Android plugin requires the following:

• Gradle 4.4 or higher.

  To learn more, read the section about updating Gradle.

• Build Tools 27.0.3 or higher.

  Keep in mind, you no longer need to specify a version for the build tools using the android.buildToolsVersion property—the plugin uses the minimum required version by default.

New DEX compiler, D8

By default, Android Studio now uses a new DEX compiler called D8. DEX compilation is the process of transforming .class bytecode into .dex bytecode for the Android Runtime (or Dalvik, for older versions of Android). Compared to the previous compiler, called DX, D8 compiles faster and outputs smaller DEX files, all while having the same or better app runtime performance.

D8 shouldn't change your day-to-day app development workflow. However, if you experience any issues related to the new compiler, please report a bug. You can temporarily disable D8 and use DX by including the following in your project's gradle.properties file:

      android.enableD8=false
    

For projects that use Java 8 language features, incremental desugaring is enabled by default. You can disable it by specifying the following in your project's gradle.properties file:

      android.enableIncrementalDesugaring=false.
    

Preview users: If you're already using a preview version of D8, note that it now compiles against libraries included in the SDK build tools—not the JDK. So, if you are accessing APIs that exist in the JDK but not in the SDK build tools libraries, you get a compile error.

Behavior changes

• When building multiple APKs that each target a different ABI, the no longer generates APKs for the following ABIs by default: mips, mips64, and armeabi.

  If you want to build APKs that target these ABIs, you must use NDK r16b or lower and specify the ABIs in your build.gradle file, as shown below:

            splits {
                abi {
                    include 'armeabi', 'mips', 'mips64'
                    ...
                }
            }
          

            splits {
                abi {
                    include("armeabi", "mips", "mips64")
                    ...
                }
            }
          

• The Android plugin's build cache now evicts cache entries that are older than 30 days.

• Passing "auto" to resConfig no longer automatically picks string resources to package into your APK. If you continue to use "auto", the plugin packages all string resources your app and its dependencies provide. So, you should instead specify each locale that you want the plugin to package into your APK.

• Because local modules can't depend on your app's test APK, adding dependencies to your instrumented tests using the androidTestApi configuration, instead of androidTestImplementation, causes Gradle to issue the following warning:

          WARNING: Configuration 'androidTestApi' is obsolete
          and has been replaced with 'androidTestImplementation'
          

          WARNING: Configuration 'androidTestApi' is obsolete
          and has been replaced with 'androidTestImplementation'
          

Fixes

• Fixes an issue where Android Studio doesn't properly recognize dependencies in composite builds.
• Fixes an issue where you get a project sync error when loading the Android plugin multiple times in a single build–for example, when multiple subprojects each include the Android plugin in their buildscript classpath.