2019-06-19 | AAPT Errors Caused by Google Dependency Updates

We have received reports of customers running into AAPT errors when running Android builds in Ionic Appflow or locally on their own machines.

Root Cause

Google updated a number of Android support libraries on Monday, June 19th 2019 to support the new AndroidX Support Library. This resulted in a number of breaking changes to projects with libraries using relative version specifications for their underlying Android support libraries.

You can read about those updates here.

What platform(s) are affected?

iOS:  No Risk

iOS applications are unaffected by this issue.

Android: Low Risk

The majority of Android applications will NOT be affected by this issue. See below for details.

Scope

The projects that are most likely to see these errors are those making use of plugins using some of the libraries updated in the post above - this includes Firebase, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Tag Manager or any other plugin making use of play-services libraries.

This issue is NOT caused by Ionic Appflow and needs to be addressed by developers in their Cordova projects. If you plan to build with Appflow, it is strongly recommended that you look into a plugin-based solution rather than modifying your native project directly.

What can I do?

1. First, try upgrading your project to cordova-android 8.0.0 (the latest) and see if the build issue is resolved.
2. Second, you can check your Google-related dependencies (such as cordova-plugin-firebase) for updates or Github issues that provide possible workarounds or resolutions.
   1. For example, the cordova-plugin-firebase repo has this GH issue with ongoing conversation about how to address the problem.
   2. Potential Solution 1 (Install a different fork of the Firebase plugin, cordova-plugin-firebasex)
   3. Potential Solution 2 (Install additional plugins to support AndroidX)

Note

AAPT errors can also be caused by other, non-Google-related dependencies in your project. Please see our previous post on AAPT errors that may also help you resolve your build issue.