Android: Project ‘XXXXX’ not found in root project ‘XXXXXX’

Sync may be required

Solution

Delete .gradle folder (which is in project’s root folder), and in Android Studio, from File menu click “Sync Project with Gradle Files” option.

Reason

Once this happened to me after switching Git branches:

• In branch feature/a I had a Gradle module named a.
• In branch feature/b there was no module a.

After I switched from feature/a to feature/b, I received the following build output:

Project 'a' not found in root project 'MyApp'

It seems that Android Studio didn’t sync with Gradle files after switching to another branch.

Project structure mismatch

Solution

Required structure preview:

root-folder/
  |
  |--- app/
  |      |
  |      |--- build.gradle
  |
  |--- build.gradle
  |--- settings.gradle

Steps:

• Ensure the Root-Project’s files are placed in a sub-folder of root-folder, for example, let’s call it “app” folder.
• Then import said app folder in root-folder’s settings.gradle file, like: include ':app' rootProject.name = 'root-folder' project(':app').name = 'root-project'
• Finally, ensure root-folder’s build.gradle file does not “apply plugin: 'com.android.application'“, which should be applied in app/build.gradle file instead.

In other words, Anything related to App needs to be moved to a sub-folder (of root-folder if not already), and the root-folder’s build.gradle file should only have buildscript { ... } block (or any setting applied to all sub-projects).

Reason

It happened after upgrading our Android-Studio IDE, that whenever we were trying to run Android-tests, the latest IDE version 2021.1.1 (at time of writing) had a bug and OP’s error was logged.