Execution failed app:processDebugResources Android Studio

Question

For me it helped to change the version of buildTools to:

buildToolsVersion "21.0.1"

You will find this setting inside the file app/build.gradle.

You're hitting bug https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=42752. The cause usually seems to be a reference to a nonexistent string in one of your menu resources.

For me it was that I forgot to install the 32bit dependencies:

sudo apt-get install -y lib32gcc1 libc6-i386 lib32z1 lib32stdc++6
sudo apt-get install -y lib32ncurses5 lib32gomp1 lib32z1-dev lib32bz2-dev

aapt is 32 bit so will not execute on a 64 bit box until 32 bit architecture is enabled

dpkg --print-foreign-architectures  #  if prints nothing then below is fix

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386  #  add a 32 bit architecture to box

sudo apt-get install -y lib32gcc1 libc6-i386 lib32z1 lib32stdc++6

sudo apt-get install -y lib32ncurses5 lib32gomp1 lib32z1-dev

it work for me.

I had the same problem and fixed it doing a ./gradlew clean build! Give it a try and if that doesn't work, try ./gradlew --refresh-dependencies after and you should be good to go.

My answer may seem a bit too late, but i happened to come across this same error in Android Studio after upgrading the SDK to API 21. I tried all the solutions i came across here on this site and https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=61308. Here's how i eventually resoled this error: I opened the app's gradle.build file and changed it from this:

android {
    compileSdkVersion 21
    buildToolsVersion "21.0.0"

    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.abundantideas.layoutsample"
        minSdkVersion 8
        targetSdkVersion 21
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
    }

to that:

android {
    compileSdkVersion 21
    buildToolsVersion "20.0.0"

    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.abundantideas.layoutsample"
        minSdkVersion 8
        targetSdkVersion 20
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
    }

I lowered the buildToolsVersion and the targetSdkVersion values back to 20 which i knew was working fine before the upgrade. It looks like API 21 was causing problems for Gradle, in my case. I hope this will help others too.

In my case, I cleaned the project (Menubar -> Build -> Clean Project) and then did the build again. It worked.