Juri Strumpflohner Follow Juri is a full stack developer and tech lead with a special passion for the web and frontend development. He creates online videos for Egghead.io, writes articles on his blog and for tech magazines, speaks at conferences and holds training workshops. Juri is also a recognized Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies

Update SDK to Platform Gingerbread 2.3: Conversion to Dalvik Format Failed

Dec 8, 2010 2 min read

Today I took the chance (and a bit of free time) to upgrade to the latest Android SDK release, namely Gingerbread. Experience has shown that you better back up your Eclipse as well as currently installed Android SDK folder, especially if you're working on an important project (which I consider my Master thesis project to be kind of ;)).

After upgrading, performing the mandatory "Eclipse > Project > Clean" the following errors popped up:

...SDK Manager] Warning: Ignoring platform '.DS_Store', not a folder.

Well this was solved quickly. Apparently for some reason OSX added the .DS_Store folder (which is a hidden one) to the platforms folder of the Android SDK. A quick rm -rf .DS_Store fixed the issue.

The next problem I encountered was the following message which hindered my project to build correctly:

Conversion to Dalvik format failed: Unable to execute dex: null

Apparently the problem was related to the fact that my Android project referenced another Java project containing shared classes. Removing and re-attaching the reference didn't solve the problem. Neither did a clean in Eclipse.
Fortunately Xav, Stackoverflow user and Android SDK Tech Lead at Google Inc posted that they released a new version 8.0.1 of the Android Eclipse ADT, specifically for fix this issue. So by simply updating to the new plugin solved the issue.

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