Broken Android builds with the react-native-branch plugin [SDK 48]

[Noitham]

Summary

I've noticed when adding the @config-plugins/react-native-branch plugin on my project, Android stops building. The error thrown is the following:

FAILURE: Build completed with 2 failures.

1: Task failed with an exception.
-----------
* Where:
Build file '.../android/app/build.gradle' line: 21

* What went wrong:
A problem occurred evaluating project ':app'.
> path may not be null or empty string. path=''

* Try:
> Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace.
> Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
> Run with --scan to get full insights.
==============================================================================

2: Task failed with an exception.
-----------
* What went wrong:
A problem occurred configuring project ':app'.
> compileSdkVersion is not specified. Please add it to build.gradle

* Try:
> Run with --stacktrace option to get the stack trace.
> Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
> Run with --scan to get full insights.
==============================================================================

As soon as removing the @config-plugins/react-native-branch from the project & app.cofing.ts plugins list, it builds fine again and no errors are shown.

Config Plugin

@config-plugins/react-native-branch

What platform(s) does this occur on?

Android

SDK Version

48

Reproducible demo

Project using:

{
...
"expo": "~48.0.9",
"expo-build-properties": "~0.6.0",
"react-native-branch": "5.8.0"
...
}

1. Add @config-plugins/react-native-branch@5.0.0.
2. Setup plugin on app.config.ts

   1. 
      ['@config-plugins/react-native-branch',
      {
        apiKey: process.env.BRANCH_API_KEY,
        iosAppDomain: process.env.BRANCH_URL,
      }]

3. expo prebuild
4. expo run:android 💥

[Noitham]

Seems it all was caused by android.enableProguardInReleaseBuilds being set to false.

[wolfdavo]

Where did you set this? Having the same issue and struggling to resolve.