Android Studio 3.0 Execution failed for task: unable to merge dex

Question

android studio was getting build error while build execution with following:

Error:Execution failed for task \':app:transformDexArchiveWithExternalLi

Answer 1

Are you in between SDK or platform updates? If yes complete those completely and then try to continue. I normally update the individual packages that need to be updated as to taking the entire update which could go up to 2.5 GB sometimes. Doing this complete update sometimes fails. I had a number of SDK updates once I upgraded to Android Studio 3.0 and was getting the above error since all packages had not been updated. Once I updated all packages the above error was gone.

Answer 2

For Cordova based project, run cordova clean android before build again, as @mkimmet suggested.

Answer 3

1)Please add multiDexEnabled true
2)if you get compilation error then check your app level build.gradle weather same dependencies are implemented with different versions.
3)Remove one if you find same dependencies.

android { compileSdkVersion 28 defaultConfig {

    minSdkVersion 17
    targetSdkVersion 28
    versionCode 1
    versionName "1.0"
    testInstrumentationRunner "android.support.test.runner.AndroidJUnitRunner"
    multiDexEnabled true
}

hope it works fine :) Happy Coding

Answer 4

For me what fixed this error was changing one line in my app's gradle dependencies.

from this:

compile('com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:+') {
    force = true
}

To this:

compile('com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm:11.8.0') {
    force = true
}

Answer 5

For me, the problem was the use of Java 1.8 in a module, but not in the app module. I added this to the app build gradle and worked:

android{
    compileOptions {
        sourceCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
        targetCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
    }

Answer 6

You can always revert to DX for now via this setting in your project's gradle.properties file:

android.enableD8=false

For more info, see https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/android-studio-switching-to-d8-dexer.html