Xamarin.Android Build fails in VS2019

Question

Hello StackOverflow Users,

i have a Xamarin.Android project and i want to switch to VS2019 after being stuck on VS2015. However i can't build the project. Whenever i build the project, i get the following error:

error: cannot find symbol
            String[] splitApks = applicationInfo.splitPublicSourceDirs;
  symbol:   variable splitPublicSourceDirs
  location: variable applicationInfo of type ApplicationInfo

I tried stuff like enabling packages specific to ABIs, switching the dex compiler, deleting the /bin and /obj directories but none of these changed anything. I also looked up the message on Google, but i didn't find anything relevant.

Answer 1

So i found a solution or rather a workaround myself.

I tried to change the target SDK and as it turned out this fixed my build. I couldn't build the app with the Android 4.4 SDK. However i could build the app without a hitch with any other target SDK starting with Android 5.0. You can set the target SDK in the Project Settings -> Application.