Android Studio Gradle Cannot resolve symbol 'applicationVariants'

Question

I'm trying to get around an annoying issue with Gradle that does not allow libraries to have different min/target sdk's. The solution was to add the following to build.gradle.

android.applicationVariants.all{ variant ->
    // This is an annoying hack to get around the fact that the Gradle plugin does not support
    // having libraries with different minSdkVersions. Play Services has a min version of 9 (Gingerbread)
    // but Android Maps Utils supports 8 (Froyo) still
    variant.processManifest.doFirst {
        File manifestFile = file("${buildDir}/exploded-bundles/ComGoogleMapsAndroidAndroidMapsUtils03.aar/AndroidManifest.xml")
        if (manifestFile.exists()) {
            println("Replacing minSdkVersion in Android Maps Utils")
            String content = manifestFile.getText('UTF-8')
            content = content.replaceAll(/minSdkVersion="8"/, 'minSdkVersion=\"9\"')
            manifestFile.write(content, 'UTF-8')
            println(content)
        }
    }
}

However when i do that, I get an error that applicationVariants cannot be resolved. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Aparrently, this is an Android Studio bug and is telling me there are errors where there's none. Building and ignoring works fine.