Flutter: Your project requires a newer version of the Kotlin Gradle plugin

This short article shows you how to solve a problem you might encounter when developing an Android app with Flutter.

The Error

When trying to start a Flutter project with an Android emulator, I ran into the following issue:

Your project requires a newer version of the Kotlin Gradle plugin

This project was created months ago. Here’s the detailed error message:

BUILD FAILED in 1m 2s
Running Gradle task 'assembleDebug'...                             64.3s

Flutter Fix ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[!] Your project requires a newer version of the Kotlin Gradle plugin.                              
Find the latest version on https://kotlinlang.org/docs/gradle.html#plugin-and-versions, then update
/Users/goodman/Desktop/Projects/kindacode/android/build.gradle:                   
ext.kotlin_version = '<latest-version>'                                                             
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 

Exception: Gradle task assembleDebug failed with exit code 1

If you confront the same error as mine, don’t panic. The solution isn’t hard to follow.

Solution

All you need to do is to open the <your project>/android/build.gradle file then update ext.kotlin_version to a newer version. The screenshot below clearly depicts what I mean (but don’t use version 1.6.10 since it is too old. You will see how to find a proper version number just after this picture):

At the time of writing, the latest version is 1.8.10. However, things change over time. To get the update-to-date version number of the Kotlin Gradle plugin, go to https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/compatibility.html#kotlin.

Now run your project again, and it should work as expected:

That’s it. Further reading:

• Flutter: Changing App Display Name for Android & iOS
• 3 Ways to Cancel a Future in Flutter and Dart
• Flutter StreamBuilder examples (null safety)
• Flutter: SliverGrid example
• Flutter: Creating an Auto-Resize TextField

You can also check out our Flutter category page or Dart category page for the latest tutorials and examples.