React Native - Android Build Failed for app:transformClassesAndResourcesWithR8ForRelease Error

06 Oct 2019

When Building Android App from React Native CLI, I got error:

> Task :app:transformClassesAndResourcesWithR8ForRelease
R8 is the new Android code shrinker. If you experience any issues, please file a bug at
https://issuetracker.google.com, using 'Shrinker (R8)' as component name. You can
disable R8 by updating gradle.properties with 'android.enableR8=false'.
Current version is: 1.4.94 (build 390954928f0db9c3b888a367f7f128ce3bbfb160 from go/r8bot (luci-r8-ci-archive-0-5g74)).

D8: Attribute Signature requires InnerClasses attribute. Check -keepattributes directive.

> Task :app:transformClassesAndResourcesWithR8ForRelease FAILED

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:transformClassesAndResourcesWithR8ForRelease'.
> com.android.tools.r8.CompilationFailedException: Compilation failed to complete

Dependency	Version
react-native	0.60.4
google-service	4.3.2
firebase-analytics	17.2.0

Possible Solutions

Removing build files and caches

cd adnroid && ./gradlew clean
./gradlew assembleRelease
cd ..

It is the easiest way for the most of build failures, yet in my case it didn’t work.

Sync Project With Gradle File in Android studio

Open the project in Android Studio and click “Sync Project With Gradle File” button. Since I deleted node_modules and yarn.lock for previus iOS build failure, I thought I might have to sync my gradle file again.

It didn’t work.

Jetify

Since, I removed and reinstalled dependencies, I ran yarn jetify. It didn’t make build successful.

Disable R8

Build error seems to be related to R8, so I manually added android.enableR8 = false to android/gradle.properties file. Yet I encountered another build error:

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:transformClassesWithDexBuilderForRelease'.
> com.android.build.api.transform.TransformException: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException

Downgrade Google Services Version

The latest dependency I added was things related to firebase-analytics. So I tried to check whether some of versions might not working with react-native project.

Dependency	Version
react-native	0.60.4
google-services	4.3.2
firebase-analytics	17.2.0

So I commented each dependencies related to firebase, and test building. I found that “google-services” is the curprit. Downgrading “google-services version from 4.3.2 to 4.3.1 solved my build error.