Investigate why CI fails in Ubuntu 24.04

[thatfiredev]

Most of our GitHub Actions have started failing recently with:

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

What went wrong:
Execution failed for task ':admob:app:validateSigningDebug'.
java.io.IOException: Unable to create debug keystore in /home/runner/.config/.android because it is not writable.
138 actionable tasks: 86 executed, 13 from cache, 39 up-to-date

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BUILD FAILED in 3m 46s
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

Not entirely sure why, but I'm guessing something changed in GitHub Actions recently.

[thatfiredev]

This seems to be due to Ubuntu 24.04 becoming the new default runner (instead of 22.04 - see actions/runner-images#10636). But I don't see anything in those breaking changes that could potentially cause this error.

However, some folks have noticed that 24.04 adds an extra .config directory to certain paths.

I didn't have the time to investigate this further, so I have just pinned the Ubuntu version to 22.04 for now. (#603)

I'll keep this issue open until we find a fix that lets us use Ubuntu 24.04

[kikoso]

Did you manage to find out why this is failing? We are experiencing the same in another repo.

[thatfiredev]

@kikoso I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to be working again (as seen in #606) so it was probably a bug in the GitHub Actions image or one of its included tools.

My last failing build was using Ubuntu 24.04 version 20250120.5.0, and #606 uses Ubuntu 24.04 version 20250126.1.0.
Upon diffing the 2 I noticed that those tools were changed:

• Gradle 8.12 -> 8.12.1
• Android SDK Build Tools 35.0.1 (added)

Not sure if they were the root cause.