Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_OLDER_SDK] Android-L

Recently there was a post here regarding the L SDK's incompatibility with prior versions of Android. I've been digging in AOSP repositories for quite a few hours now, and determined that the tools behave this way because they are designed to treat preview platforms differently. If you compile against a preview SDK (android-L), the build tools will lock minSdkVersion and targetSdkVersion to that same API level. This results in the produced application being unable to be installed on devices running older releases of Android, even if your application isn't doing anything specific to L. To make matters worse, the new support libs (CardView, RecyclerView, Palette, etc.) are also locked into the L API level, even though--according to their repository names--they should work on API level 7 just fine (and they do!).

See my Reddit post about this here, with a workaround.

Once you have the above issues resolved as mentioned by Eddie. You might also run into another error;;

Error:Error retrieving parent for item: No resource found that matches the given name 'android:Theme.Material.Light'.

This will be present in your styles.xml . The quick fix is to replace it with the following below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources><!--<style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Material.Light">--><style name="AppTheme" parent="android:Theme.Holo.Light"></style>

Change

android {    compileSdkVersion 'android-L'    buildToolsVersion '20.0.0'

to

android {  compileSdkVersion 21  buildToolsVersion '21.0.2'

Note android-L is in single quotes but 21 isn't. 21 is an integer and not a string.