[android-studio] What is Gradle in Android Studio?

At the risk of being discursive I think behind this is the question of why the Android Studio / Gradle experience is so bad.

Typical Clojure experience :

  • download project with dependencies listed in project.clj.
  • Leiningen gets the dependencies thanks to Clojars and Maven.
  • Project compiles.

Typical Android Studio / Gradle experience :

  • "Import my Eclipse project".
  • OK project imported.
  • Gradle is doing it's thang ... wait ... wait ... wait ... Gradle has finished.
  • Compile ... can't compile because I don't know what an X is / can't find Y library.

I'm not sure this is Gradle's fault exactly. But the "import from Eclipse project" seems pretty flaky. For all of Gradle's alleged sophistication and the virtues of a build-system, Android Studio just doesn't seem to import the build dependencies or build-process from Eclipse very well.

It doesn't tell you when it's failed to import a complete dependency graph. The Android Studio gives no useful help or tips as to how to solve the problem. It doesn't tell you where you can manually look in the Eclipse folders. It doesn't tell you which library seems to be missing. Or help you search Maven etc. for them.

In 2016 things like Leiningen / Clojars, or node's npm, or Python's pip, or the Debian apkg (and I'm sure many similar package managers for other languages and systems) all work beautifully ... missing dependencies are thing of the past.

Except with Android. Android Studio is now the only place where I still seem to experience missing-dependency hell.

I'm inclined to say this is Google's fault. They broke the Android ecosystem (and thousands of existing Android projects / online tutorials) when they cavalierly decided to shift from Eclipse to Android Studio / Gradle without producing a robust conversion process. People whose projects work in Eclipse aren't adapting them to AS (presumably because it's a pain for them). And people trying to use those projects in AS are hitting the same issues.

And anyway, if Gradle is this super-powerful build system, why am I still managing a whole lot of other dependencies in the sdk manager? Why can't a project that needs, say, the ndk specify this in its Gradle file so that it gets automatically installed and built-against when needed? Why is NDK special? Similarly for target platforms? Why am I installing them explicitly in the IDE rather than just checking my project against them and having this all sorted for me behind the scenes?

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A failure occurred while executing com.android.build.gradle.internal.tasks "Failed to install the following Android SDK packages as some licences have not been accepted" error Android Gradle 5.0 Update:Cause: org.jetbrains.plugins.gradle.tooling.util This version of Android Studio cannot open this project, please retry with Android Studio 3.4 or newer WARNING: API 'variant.getJavaCompile()' is obsolete and has been replaced with 'variant.getJavaCompileProvider()' Flutter plugin not installed error;. When running flutter doctor ADB.exe is obsolete and has serious performance problems Android design support library for API 28 (P) not working Flutter command not found How to find the path of Flutter SDK

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Gradle - Move a folder from ABC to XYZ A failure occurred while executing com.android.build.gradle.internal.tasks Gradle: Could not determine java version from '11.0.2' Android Gradle 5.0 Update:Cause: org.jetbrains.plugins.gradle.tooling.util Deprecated Gradle features were used in this build, making it incompatible with Gradle 5.0 Failed to resolve: com.android.support:appcompat-v7:28.0 Failed to resolve: com.google.firebase:firebase-core:16.0.1 com.google.android.gms:play-services-measurement-base is being requested by various other libraries java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:failed resolution of :Lorg/apache/http/ProtocolVersion Error - Android resource linking failed (AAPT2 27.0.3 Daemon #0)

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WARNING: API 'variant.getJavaCompile()' is obsolete and has been replaced with 'variant.getJavaCompileProvider()' Android Material and appcompat Manifest merger failed Unable to resolve dependency for ':app@debug/compileClasspath': Could not resolve Failed to resolve: com.google.firebase:firebase-core:16.0.1 com.google.android.gms:play-services-measurement-base is being requested by various other libraries Invoke-customs are only supported starting with android 0 --min-api 26 error: resource android:attr/fontVariationSettings not found Exception : AAPT2 error: check logs for details Could not resolve com.android.support:appcompat-v7:26.1.0 in Android Studio new project Failed to resolve: com.android.support:appcompat-v7:27.+ (Dependency Error)

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