How to resolve error "Failed to resolve: org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jre7..." when building in Android Studio

I've created a new project by checking the "include kotlin" box in Android Studio 3 and out of the box I get an error while compiling

"Failed to resolve: org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jre7..."

I have made sure all plugins are up to date and that the Android SDK is properly installed.

How can I solve for this error?


kotlin-stdlib-jre[7/8] was deprecated a while ago, and has since been removed. The deprecation note was kept until 1.2.71, which was the last version to release those artifacts. The official deprecation notice can be found here. Using any of the deprecated versions (before it was removed) should also produce a warning in (at least) Android Studio and IntelliJ.

Use kotlin-stdlib-jdk7 instead. It's the same dependency as kotlin-stdlib-jre7 (except newer), but it was re-named to kotlin-stdlib-jdk. kotlin-stdlib-jre is now no longer maintained as a separate dependency.

Both IntelliJ and Android Studio currently generate new projects using kotlin-stdlib-jre7; this likely is a bug. They have probably not updated the project generators. Therefore, you have to manually replace the dependencies with working ones until they fix this. This is dependent on the Kotlin plugin. Update it if you haven't. I haven't checked whether it's been patched or not - if it has, that only fixes the creation of new projects. For updating from older versions, the rest of the answer still applies

You naturally have to do this if you're on 1.2.71 or lower, and you're upgrading to 1.3.0 or higher.

These are the new valid dependencies as of Kotlin 1.3.0:

implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk7:$kotlin_version"
implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:$kotlin_version"

Where $kotlinVersion is either a variable containing the version, or a hard-coded version (i.e. 1.3.0)


Alternatively, you can use the "plain" stdlib (kotlin-stdlib) instead of the JDK-specific versions. But you have to change your dependency either way, so I recommend you go with kotlin-stdlib-jdk7, or if you plan on using Java 8, kotlin-stdlib-jdk8

The newest versions of the dependencies can also be found here. jdk7, jdk8, and the version-unspecific stdlib all follow the same versions (as per this edit - this could change in the future, but there'll likely be notices before that change happens), so whether you check jdk8, jdk7 or the regular one, all the versions should be universally available across the stdlib artifacts.

Note for other build systems

The same actual solution applies to other build systems as well, but the code is different. As there are a lot of build systems, I'm not going to include all of them, but the point is changing the artifact from kotlin-stdlib-jre[num] to kotlin-stdlib-jdk[num] (without brackets of course). Or, as mentioned earlier, kotlin-stdlib.

Independently of the build system, this bases itself on access to Maven Central and similar repositories. If your build system doesn't support this, and/or breaks with Maven-style conventions and repositories, you'll have to find what works for your build system.

TL;DR:

Use org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk7:$kotlin_version or org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:$kotlin_version (depending on which version you originally used) instead.


Remove this line from the build.gradle:

implementation"org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jre7:$kotlin_version"

Add this line in the build.gradle:

implementation "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib-jdk8:$kotlin_version"

Update the version build.gradle in project level: kotlin version='1.3.0'