Why does my Android project fail to build after updating my SDK to include v20 and the latest build tools?

Question

After upgrading my build tools to the latest versions (SDK Tools v23, Platform Tools v20, and Android Studio v0.8.1) I got the following error building my project:

uses-sdk:minSdkVersion 14 cannot be smaller than version L declared in library com.android.support:support-v4:21.0.0-rc1

This didn't make any sense to me since my project explicitly defines the support version to be 19.1.0 everywhere it is used.

Answer 1

I realized that a library I was including was actually requesting an unbounded version of the support library which resulted in the L preview version being included.

To fix this, I added the following:

compile ('name_of_library:0.9.9') {
    exclude group: 'com.android.support', module:'support-v4'
}

Provided you include a version of the support library greater than or equal to the minimum version used by that library, everything should work fine.

To help identify the offending library, type the following:

./gradlew :your_project_name:dependencies

You'll get a handy spew output showing the dependencies of your project and what versions they all get mapped to.