Ionic 5 cordova app suddenly can no longer build

I have an Ionic 5 (cordova not capacitor) project that I have been working on for a while. I have built it many times over the past couple months. I last built successfully a couple weeks ago. It has always built. I hadn’t touched it in a couple weeks and came back to work on sorting out some GeoLocation issues which required adding a few new plugins. I got the new geo approach working in Chrome and then went to try to build. I found out the app would no longer build. I removed plugins, reverted back to an old version from git and no luck.

The errors were not consistent but this was one of them:

> Task :app:processDebugResources FAILED

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

* What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':app:processDebugResources'.
> A failure occurred while executing com.android.build.gradle.internal.tasks.Workers$ActionFacade
   > Android resource linking failed
     E:\www\sz.app\platforms\android\app\src\main\res\xml\authenticator.xml:2: AAPT: error: resource mipmap/icon (aka nl.stolpersteinezutphen.www:mipmap/icon) not found.

I must have found some posts talking about versions of Java so I spent hours uninstalling and re-installing various versions of JDK and JRE. I was about to call it a night when i tried to build one more time. Much to my surprise; the app built. I loaded it on a device and it worked fine.

Excited by this unexpected fix i wanted to re-add some of the new geo plugins to see if that new solution would work on a device. When i tried to do standard plugin install:

ionic cordova plugin add @mauron85/cordova-plugin-background-geolocation

it said i could not add a plugin that way to a capacitor project. When did my project become a capacitor project?

After some digging I found out I could remove it from being a capacitor project by doing this:

ionic integrations disable capacitor

but of course, after doing that my project would no longer build. I put it back as a capacitor project and it still would not build. I am now getting the error posted above, again, after hours wasted trying to sort out Java environment.

No idea why this all of sudden stopped being buildable. Tomorrow I will try a fresh ionic starter app and see if that builds; and then if it does, perhaps only solution here is to start with a fresh build and re-add all the plugins and code from scratch.

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Thanks for sharing such a valuable information. Many are struggling.

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Turned out to be a plugin i was using: https://github.com/mauron85/cordova-plugin-background-geolocation-example and there was a partial fix for it there.