This is really a question for the Android (Studio) developer support team at Google. Please let me know if there is a better channel for this.
Background
I noticed an increasing number of libart.so crashes being reported in Google Play Console for my app. The same crashes don't show up in Crashlytics, I can't reproduce them myself, and they only seem to impact a few dozen users. I am not including any details of these crashes because I don't think it is relevant to my question, but I am open to be convinced otherwise.
I found a small number of reports about similar issues, for example this and this. These gave me the impression that the root cause may be the Android build system and in particular the D8 compiler.
I think these crashes started to happen after I released a new version of my app built with Android Studio 3.2.1. Previously, I was using the latest 3.1.x Android Studio build, which was already using D8 by default (right?), so turning D8 completely off seems a bit heavy handed. And this brings us to my...
Question
How do I revert D8 behavior back to what it was in the latest Android Studio 3.1.x build while using Android Studio 3.2.1?
Bonus question: The first bullet point under "Behavior changes" of the Android gradle plugin release notes for version 3.2.0 is "Desugaring with D8 is now enabled by default." Does this desugaring do anything if I am not using Java8 features but I am using Kotlin?
