How to fix the invalid JDK problem on Electric Eel

Introduction

When updating your Android Studio to the newest Electric Eel version, the location of the embedded JDK is changed. In particular, it changes from:

/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jre/Contents/Home

to

/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home

This might cause some problems with building your projects right after the update.

Solution

First, make sure the JDK is correctly specified for your project. Go to Preferences -> Build, Execution, Deployment -> Build Tools -> Gradle and set the Gradle JDK to the correct one (if it didn’t happen automatically):

Additionally, if your JAVA_HOME environment variable still points to the old location (as it was in my case), you will also have to update it.

You can verify it by running echo $JAVA_HOME in your terminal. If it points to a completely different location, that’s fine, you don’t have to change that. It means you are using different JDKs in Android Studio and your terminal. However, I recommend using the same JDK everywhere to avoid problems with cache or running multiple Gradle daemons.

To update it, go to your ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc (or any other place where you define your variables) and make sure you have this line there:

export JAVA_HOME="/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home"

Summary

I hope this post helped you solve your problem. I wish the JDK location change had been signaled more clearly after the update so that we wouldn’t have to spend time investigating all the issues ourselves.