I remember a time when I thought Gradle was the bee’s knees: “no XML, config written in Groovy, how awesome.” Now, it’s the most frustrating part of Android development.

A development console displays a Flutter project's debug output with warnings about deprecated plugin usage. Message reads: You are applying Flutter's app_plugin_loader Gradle plugin imperatively using the apply script method, which is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Migrate to applying Gradle plugins with the declarative plugins block, followed by a URL
Yeah, I tried that. And it completely broke my build.

Got it working in the end by upgrading Java and the Android SDK, but golly it sapped a lot from me. Although, to be fair, I’m not how standard the Gradle build is for a typical Android project. I guess it’s better than when they were using Ant.

Anyway, kids: just use Maven. Work through the XML. It’s just a better build system.