Monday, November 15, 2021

Android Studio: Fixing the warning "flatDir should be avoided"

After upgrading my gradle plugin to version 7, I encountered this warning message "Using flatDir should be avoided because it doesn't support any meta-data format".

As shown in the screenshot below, I have the word flatDir under the repositories keyword inside my Android app's build.gradle file.

 

This flatDir is used to point to the location of my local Android library file(s), named inside the build.gradle's dependencies section - shown below.

To fix the warning, all I needed to do was to do the following:

  1. Remove the flatDir part from the build.gradle file's repositories section. 
  2. Inside the build.gradle's dependencies section, replace the local Android library name implementation with the following relative path to the local library file name with extension :

    implementation files ( 'libs/my-local-library.aar')

    An example is shown below.