Gradle build failed

How to troubleshoot build failures:

First, make a blank project with a single blank scene and prove that it builds successfully.

If the blank project does NOT build, go fix your Unity installation or your other tools, such as Android SDK, NDK, JDK, etc. It may even be necessary to change to a different version of Unity3D. It is generally best to stay with LTS versions of Unity3D.

Until you can build a blank project to the target platform, don’t fiddle with anything else.

Once you can build a blank project, now bisect the problem by bringing over parts of your current project and building it one subsystem at a time, perhaps stubbing things out that might trigger compiler errors.

Most often things that prevent building are third-party libraries such as Firebase.

Once you identify the subsystem, go to the documentation for it and make sure you are doing it correctly.

It may also be helpful to work through a tutorial or two for whatever subsystem is making the build fail.

Android build not building:

Recently (circa July 2022) there have been reports of Unity’s installer failing to install the Android Tools.

https://discussions.unity.com/t/887277

Here was how I brought up Unity2020.3.41 and the Android SDK 31 on October 30, 2022:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/891017/7

Android Gradle errors and other related stuff:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/901712/2

OneDrive and any of those drive backup utilities are expressly not supported by Unity.

Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/736093/3

I usually make a separate repository for each game, but I have some repositories with a bunch of smaller test games.

Here is how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/807568/3

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/826718/2

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/719810/2

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/834885/5

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It’s simply ridiculous not to back up.

If you plan on joining the software industry, you will be required and expected to know how to use source control.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards