Is it safe to change the Android Build Tools version of a library?

Question

I imported a (commercial) charting library as a module into my app project.

For my app I'm using the latest Build Tools version "21.1.2" but the library still uses "19.1.0".

Now I wonder if it's safe to change the version of the library to "21.1.2" in it's build.gradle file or if it would be recommended to install the Build Tools "19.1.0" via the SDK Manager.

Are there any problems that could occur using a different (newer) Build Tools version?

Answer 1

Are there any problems that could occur using a different (newer) Build Tools version?

In general upgrading should be fine.

A couple things to be aware of

1. You'll need to obviously have the necessary build tools version either on your local machine (Android Studio will detect it and offer to download it for you) or on your build server.
2. There's a small chance that a change to the build tools could deprecate something, however any break should happen at compile time.

So if it successfully builds you should be good to go.