Gradle build failed is not the error

Originally published on indiecore.net . I made a throwaway Unity 6000.4.0f1 project on a Mac, built a release APK from it, and then broke it four different ways to see what the console would say. The APK took 155 seconds in the Gradle stage and came out at 27 MB. Every failure below is from a log on this laptop, not from a thread I read. The reason for doing it that way: the message everybody searches for says nothing about the project that produced it, and I wanted to know exactly where the part that does say something had gone. The error you searched for However you phrased it — unity gradle build failed , unity error gradle build failed , unity commandinvokationfailure gradle build failed , unity android build failed gradle , unity 6 gradle build failed , unity 2022 gradle build failed , unity firebase gradle build failed — you got here from the same eleven words in the console: CommandInvokationFailure: Gradle build failed. /Applications/Unity/Hub/Editor/6000.4.0f1/PlaybackEngines/AndroidPlayer/OpenJDK/bin/java -classpath "/Applications/Unity/Hub/Editor/6000.4.0f1/PlaybackEngines/AndroidPlayer/Tools/gradle/lib/gradle-launcher-8.13.jar" org.gradle.launcher.GradleMain "-Dorg.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx4096m" "assembleRelease" Environment Variables: XPC_FLAGS = 0x0 CLAUDE_CODE_ENTRYPOINT = claude-vscode ANDROID_NDK_ROOT = /Applications/Unity/.../AndroidPlayer/NDK LANG = C.UTF-8 Sixty-seven of those variables in my log, and I counted them because I kept scrolling through them looking for the reason. There isn't one in there. Unity started a Java process, the process exited 1, and this block is Unity reporting which process it started. It would look identical if the failure were a missing semicolon or a full disk. Which is why the answers on the first page of results are all different from each other, and why none of them worked for you. They are answers to different questions that produce the same sentence. Where the cause actually is Here is the shape of the whole log for