eas build android fails at :app:mergeReleaseResources, same commit builds fine locally eas-build

Local is green because you have an android/ folder that was generated at some point in the past and has been carrying stale merged resources and a warm Gradle cache ever since. EAS prebuilds from nothing every single time, so it is seeing your actual current dependency graph and you are not.

Reproduce it properly:

npx expo prebuild --clean
npx expo run:android --variant release

You will get the same failure, on your machine, with a debugger and no queue.

Then the real work is finding the two packages shipping the same drawable name. ./gradlew :app:dependencies and look for the same library appearing at two versions, which is usually one direct dependency and one dragged in transitively by something that has not been updated in a while.

Run it once with eas build --clear-cache to rule out a poisoned cache before you spend an afternoon on dependency archaeology. One flag, and if it fixes it you have your answer immediately.

Read the whole Gradle log, not the tail. The line naming the actual conflicting resource paths is usually a couple of hundred lines above Execution failed, and the failure line itself tells you almost nothing. Everyone scrolls to the bottom and then says the error is unhelpful.

Bump compileSdkVersion. Resource merge errors are usually an SDK level mismatch.

Also worth knowing generally: a different local Node or JDK version is a common source of "green here, red there", and EAS pins those from your eas.json image. Set the same versions locally and one whole category of divergence disappears.