Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Android Studio nightmares

Today I tried to build an Android Studio that was written by someone else three years ago. After some initial progress I got stuck with Error:java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: com.android.tools.aapt2.Aapt2Exception. After hours of struggle and fruitless trials, I finally looked at the details of the Gradle stack trace and saw that the top message was Execution failed for task :app:mergeDebugResources  and the bottom message was com.android.builder.png.AaptProcess$NotifierProcessOutput.out.

My problem was due to an image file name ending with .9.png. I changed the ending to .png and the problem disappeared. Thanks Gradle for the cryptic concurrent.ExecutionException (!) This sort of unhelpful error messages is a typical theme when developing Android apps, especially when dealing with legacy code. You can get stuck for days on problems that you could not have foreseen.