I’ve been setting up a MacBook Pro to be able to work on a React Native mobile app and hit a stumbling block when running the Android app locally.

I had already installed all the relevant applications needed (Android Studio, a JDK etc.) but when I ran react-native run-android, it would give me the following error:

error Failed to install the app. Make sure you have the Android development environment set up

I tried a few different things until I came across a solution proposed by Menon Hasan on Stack Overflow where they proposed the following command to set the executable permission on the gradlew file:

chmod +x gradlew

This solved my problem, so I just needed to update the index for the file in git so that nobody else will encounter the issue in the future.