When you develop apps with Cordova and Microsoft Visual Studio there are some important facts you should know. I learned these things over 2.5 years of period.
1. Visual Studio tools for apache cordova is Microsoft product and it's not updated alongside with other tools using by app developers.
- Android SDK - Updating Regularly
- X-Code - Updating Regularly ( I would recommend not to use windows based tools to publish your app to apple store. please follow this to learn how to publish your app to apple store without using remote debugging tools. https://guntucomputerhacks.blogspot.com/2016/11/visual-studio-2015-cordova-remotebuild.html )
- Cordova and Plugins - There is a big version gap between microsoft tools for Cordova.
So lets focus on this graddle issue. The latest android version released in 2018 is android 8.0 and 8.1 Oreo . But unfortunately microsoft tools for apache cordova is still supporting Android 7.1 - Nougat.
So in case you have updated your android SDK and tools you might need to rollback that update to use Microsoft tools to build and release your app to Google Play.
But again try to keep Visual Studio for development tasks and always try to native tool set for release purposes.
