Unable to run Ionic app after update to Android Studio 3.0

Question

Here\'s my Ionic Info

cli packages: (/Users/billb/dev/customer-mkt-app/node_modules)

@ionic/cli-utils  : 1.15.2
ionic (I         


        

Answer 1

So, I just spent two days battling this and came-up with a semi-manual solution.

Because Gradle decided to uproot it's dependency format without any grace period for migration, we're forced to do things like this.

(Instructions under Linux. For Windows you'd need some 7zip or something similar for the last step)

From your user home directory go to .cordova/lib/npm_cache/cordova-android.
In there, there should be one or more folders with version numbers.
Usually only the latest version is run.
Open it.
Delete the package directory, but not the package.tgz file.
Unpack the package.tgz file, then delete it, or move it to a backup location. (there are some extra files generated that we don't want to re-package later)
Edit the file package/bin/templates/cordova/lib/plugin-build.gradle and inside dependencies remove these lines

debugCompile project(path: ":CordovaLib", configuration: "debug")
releaseCompile project(path: ":CordovaLib", configuration: "release")

Replace them with

implementation project(path: ":CordovaLib")

Archive the package directory. In Linux the short command is tar czf package.tgz package. On Windows, you'd have to create a .tar.gz archive with 7zip and rename it to .tgz.

After that, in running a cordova prepare in a clean repository that worked with the old versions will work again, unless some of the plugins explicitly use the old declaration format and need to be updated (example)