I was getting this weird error on my google developer console. So i used google Cloud Test Lab to See whats really happening. turns out my app is failing on almost all devic
Not sure if this helps but I had the same issue using Android sdk 19 and it was driving me insane. I dont use Firebase (at least not purposefully) I am not sure why, but the error ceased when I set "minifyEnabled true" in the gradle config.
I see you have yours commented out in your releases section.