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.