I got this error going from Gradle 3.5.3 to 5.4.1 (Android Studio prompted and I clicked "Upgrade".)
Gradle proceeded to upgrade but yielded some errors such as:
ONFIGURE SUCCESSFUL in 1m 27s
ERROR: The Android Gradle plugin supports only Crashlytics Gradle plugin version 1.25.4 and higher.
The following dependencies do not satisfy the required version:
root project 'Android%20App' -> io.fabric.tools:gradle:1.25.1
Update plugins
Affected Modules: app
INFO: API 'variant.getExternalNativeBuildTasks()' is obsolete and has been replaced with 'variant.getExternalNativeBuildProviders()'.
It will be removed at the end of 2019.
For more information, see https://d.android.com/r/tools/task-configuration-avoidance.
To determine what is calling variant.getExternalNativeBuildTasks(), use -Pandroid.debug.obsoleteApi=true on the command line to display more information.
Affected Modules: app
INFO: The specified Android SDK Build Tools version (27.0.3) is ignored, as it is below the minimum supported version (28.0.3) for Android Gradle Plugin 3.5.3.
Android SDK Build Tools 28.0.3 will be used.
To suppress this warning, remove "buildToolsVersion '27.0.3'" from your build.gradle file, as each version of the Android Gradle Plugin now has a default version of the build tools.
Install Build Tools 28.0.3, update version in build file and sync project
Affected Modules: app
The thing that fixed it was opening Settings --> Appearance & Behavior --> System Settings --> Android SDK and I then selected some recent versions of Android SDK like 8, 9, and 10. (I had only had 5.1, 6.0, and Android N Preview installed.)
Once that's installed, I had to modify my build.gradle file for my Module: app
Then I clicked the "Sync Project with Gradle Files" button on the toolbar. The Sync output window offered an option to "Update Plugins" and once I clicked through that everything seemed to work. For good measure I again clicked "Sync Project with Gradle Files" followed by Build --> Clean Project, and finally I was able to run my project again.