Android Studio - with Junit 4.12 “!!! JUnit version 3.8 or later expected:”

Solved the issue. I was running the JUnit tests as a standard "JUnit test" in Android Studio. I fixed the issue by resetting the configuration as a Android Test.

Just to add one more situation. I was having this error after updating Android Studio to 4.1 on a project using old AGP (3.3.2) and Gradle (4.10.2). What ended up solving the issue for me was removing the android.test.runner library from gradle dependencies, that is removing the following line from the app's module build.gradle:

useLibrary 'android.test.runner'

I probably got lucky to not actually need any of the classes provided by the library for unit or instrumented tests.

I solve this problem by moving "testCompile 'junit:junit:4.12'" to the first order in build.gradle dependency block