No version of NDK matched the requested version

Question

After updating to Android Gradle plugin 3.6.0 (released Feb 24, 2020), several project independently started failing with:

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Answer 1

To answer the part of your question not answered by others, "Where and how is this older version specified? And how do I update it so it matches the latest version 21.0.6113669?":

The default version is set by the Android Gradle plugin. Each version will default to whatever version of the NDK that we used during testing to guarantee the best possible compatibility.

The difference between this and earlier plugin versions is that it used to happily use any NDK that you happened to have installed. This caused a ton of "works on my machine" issues for users where their co-workers couldn't build the project, it wouldn't work on CI but would locally, etc. It wasn't a good situation.

You can pick a specific version of the NDK to use in your project by setting android.ndkVersion in your build.gradle. if you don't, it'll try to use the default version for the Gradle plugin that you're using.

The annoying bit is that most versions (until 4.1) will not automatically download the default version, which gives you the error you're seeing. If you explicitly pick a version in your build.gradle it actually will download automatically, and with 4.1 it will automatically download the default version too.

A thing that often confuses people is why this hits them when they're not using the NDK, or at least believe they are not. The answer in that case is that one of your dependencies includes native libraries and these need to be stripped before they are packed into the APK to keep size down, and strip comes from the NDK.