The ant/ folder is suddenly missing from Android SDK. Did Google remove it?

Question

I've tried compiling libreoffice core project (choosing Android module) (with make, no Gradle involved yet), and I'm getting this error:

/home/aleksandar/libreoffice/workdir/UnpackedTarball/owncloud_android_lib/build.xml:90:  Cannot find /home/aleksandar/Android/Sdk/tools/ant/build.xml imported from /home/aleksandar/libreoffice/workdir/UnpackedTarball/owncloud_android_lib/build.xml 

When looking through my SDK, I realized that /Sdk/tools/ant folder doesn't even exist. Is this the way that it should be?

I'm not sure why it causes that error now, especially that I've built the project many times without any problems. The only thing that I'm aware of that was changed is that I've updated all the tools (SDK and NDK). Was there any backwards compatibility-breaking change in those around the time of posting this (March 2017)? It may be the change in the source code that introduced the bug, but I'm sure it would be noticed already, and this is going on for a couple of days... Did anyone encounter a similar issue?

Answer 1

Yes

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Android team has decided to remove all old and obsolete scripts from SDK in march release of 25.3.0 SDK Tools

https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/sdk-tools.html SDK Tools, Revision 25.3.0 (March 2017)

Changes:

• Obsolete/deprecated tools have been removed:
  • android
  • ddms (instead see Using DDMS)
  • draw9patch (instead see Draw 9-patch)
  • hierarchyviewer (instead see Profile Your Layout with Hierarchy Viewer)
  • traceview (instead see Profiling with Traceview and dmtracedump)
  • ant scripts
  • Project and activity templates

here you can download older version:

https://dl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r25.2.5-windows.zip

https://dl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r25.2.5-macosx.zip

https://dl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r25.2.5-linux.zip