by Maik

Cordova: All flavors must now belong to a named flavor dimension.

Messing around with Cordova I stumbled upon the following exception when building the app for Android:

A problem occurred configuring root project 'android'.
> All flavors must now belong to a named flavor dimension. Learn more at https://d.android.com/r/tools/flavorDimensions-missing-error-message.html

The almighty folks over at Stackoverflow suggest to update the build.gradle and add a flavorDimensions parameter into the android section. As this smells like a dirty workaround for an issue that should (as always) not be happening in the first place, I found some deeper digging into this topic from Dave Alden. To sum it up: cordova-android@6.4.0 requires Gradle v4, but cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview is incompatible with Gradle 4.

This leaves you with 3,5 options:

  • Upgrade cordova-android to 7+: This might mess up all your other plugins as they did some breaking changes (that’s why I still had to stick to 6.4.0). Quite a lot of Cordova plugins are not yet compatible with Cordova v7+ as of today.
  • Downgrade cordova-android even further: This has the risk of some other side-effects, missing stability and security updates, etc.
  • Downgrade Gradle to v3: This might lead to incompatibilities with e.g. cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview
  • Abandon Cordova altogether and switch to React Native, Xamarin or Weex… but yeah.

Further references