With the release of Gradle 3 and the great performance boost it comes with, it's very tempting to update like so:

in your root build.gradle , update the Gradle plugin so that it uses Gradle 3+:

.. . dependencies { classpath ' com.android.tools.build:gradle:2.3.0 ' .. .

in your app/build.gradle , update the build tools to the latest (25), because it's mandatory to support Gradle 3+:

.. . android { compileSdkVersion 23 buildToolsVersion ' 25.0.2 ' .. .

optionaly, if you have set distributionUrl in your gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties file, you may want to replace it with:

distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-3.5-bin.zip

Sadly, you'll very much likely encounter this sort of error: The SDK Build Tools revision (23.0.1) is too low for project ':react-native-vector-icons'. Minimum required is 25.0.0 . That's because one of your dependency (here, react-native-vector-icons) uses an old build tools version.

The process of updating the dependency (make a PR, be reviewed, be merged, and be published) can take a long time. Fortunately, you can overwrite the build tools version of your dependencies. To do so, copy and paste in your root build.gradle :

ext { compileSdkVersion = 23 buildToolsVersion = ' 25.0.2 ' } subprojects { subproject -> afterEvaluate{ if ((subproject . plugins . hasPlugin( ' android ' ) || subproject . plugins . hasPlugin( ' android-library ' ))) { android { compileSdkVersion rootProject . ext . compileSdkVersion buildToolsVersion rootProject . ext . buildToolsVersion } } } }

And in your app/build.gradle , replace:

.. . android { compileSdkVersion rootProject . ext . compileSdkVersion buildToolsVersion rootProject . ext . buildToolsVersion .. .

Congratulations, you can now enjoy Gradle 3 build against the latest version of Android build-tools, thus boosting your compilation time. For example, in one of our React Native application, it now takes only 10 seconds when no changes were made!