Crashlytics could not find the manifest

Question

The Fabric SDK (for Android) intermittently fails builds with the following error:

ERROR - Crashlytics Developer Tools error.
com.crashlytics.tools.android.proj         


        

Answer 1

We were also seeing similar build errors in a couple of modules in our multi module project. Sometimes it manifested as ManifestIOException: Crashlytics could not find the manifest, other times as a usage statement followed by NullPointerException in com.crashlytics.tools.utils.PropertiesUtils.getProperties().

Both of the affected modules were library modules where both the application and its library module were using Crashlytics. We fixed the error as follows:

1. Move the following line from library build.gradle to application build.gradle:

   apply plugin: 'io.fabric'

2. Move any crashlytics blocks from library build.gradle to application build.gradle:

   crashlytics { enableNdk true }

We left the Crashlytics dependencies intact in both the application and library module, only the plugin was relocated. It seems like Crashlytics does not like to be integrated in library modules for some reason and will complain about it at compile time, so it's better to integrate Crashlytics in your app module and just add the dependencies to the library if your library needs to do anything with Crashlytics.