Receiving gradle failures despite fresh installation of Android Studio

Help/Discuss
1

I have just freshly installed Android studio and created a project with a Simple activity. The project fails to build from the scratch with this error:

Configure project :
[Fatal Error] jimfs-1.1.pom:2:1: Content is not allowed in prolog.

FAILURE: Build failed with an exception.

  • What went wrong:
    A problem occurred configuring root project ‘DataFlair To Do List’.

Could not resolve all artifacts for configuration ‘:classpath’.
Could not resolve com.google.jimfs:jimfs:1.1.
Required by:
project : > com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.6.3 > com.android.tools.build:builder:3.6.3 > com.android.tools:sdklib:26.6.3 > com.android.tools:repository:26.6.3
Could not resolve com.google.jimfs:jimfs:1.1.
Could not parse POM https://jcenter.bintray.com/com/google/jimfs/jimfs/1.1/jimfs-1.1.pom
Content is not allowed in prolog.

I read that there might be some latest updates with the URLs that will make Android fail, but I can’t find a solution to the issue and as I said, the build is failing off fresh installation of Android studio with no changes

2

I don’t really follow what’s going on in the Android ecosystem, but I have frequently seen Content is not allowed in prolog. due to bad proxy settings. If you have a proxy in your setup, double check that everything is working as expected there. The content that’s not allowed might be HTML from a proxy authentication page or similar instead of the contents of the requested POM file.