Disable android.enableJetifier for specific module or depedency

Question

Running Android Studio 3.2 with the following settings in my gradle.properties:

android.useAndroidX=true
android.enableJetifier=true

I have a native project with some C/Java code. With these settings, the compilation fails with the following error message:

org.gradle.api.artifacts.transform.ArtifactTransformException: Failed to transform file 'android.jar' to match attributes {artifactType=processed-jar} using transform JetifyTransform
java.lang.RuntimeException: Failed to transform 'C:\Android\sdk\platforms\android-28\android.jar' using Jetifier.

I believe it doesn't like my gradle file:

apply plugin: 'java'
...
dependencies {
   implementation files("${mySdkDir}/android.jar")
}

I know I can globally turn off enableJetifier which would indeed make this error go away. However, I only want to disable the jetifier for this specific module/dependency.

How do I set enableJetifier=false for a native/java module project?

Answer 1

The question probably isn't how to disable the Jetifier for the module -

because this is coming from using the wrong plugin for the module.

apply plugin: "com.android.application"
// apply plugin: "com.android.library"

android {
    ...
}

There is no way to disable the Jetifier for a module, because it is a project-wide feature... and so the only way around this is not to have android.jar being explicitly listed in the dependencies block. It's not even meant to be packaged, therefore it has lost nothing in there - and it's not meant to be processed by the Jetifier, which merely is the result of having it declared as a dependency.