You should now rely on the official way of doing muti-dexing.

Sample project illustrating how to overcome the 65536 methods dex limitation. Based on the awesome article of @alex_lipov.

To be able to overcome the 65536 methods dex limitation, simply do the following steps :

• Add to your android closure inside your build.gradle :

dexOptions {
    preDexLibraries = false
}

• Add the following closure to your build.gradle :

afterEvaluate {
    tasks.matching {
        it.name.startsWith('dex')
    }.each { dx ->
        if (dx.additionalParameters == null) {
            dx.additionalParameters = []
        }
        dx.additionalParameters += '--multi-dex'
        dx.additionalParameters += "--main-dex-list=$projectDir/multidex.keep".toString()
    }
}

• Create the file multidex.keep in the same folder than the build.gradle with the following content :

android/support/multidex/BuildConfig.class
android/support/multidex/MultiDex$V14.class
android/support/multidex/MultiDex$V19.class
android/support/multidex/MultiDex$V4.class
android/support/multidex/MultiDex.class
android/support/multidex/MultiDexApplication.class
android/support/multidex/MultiDexExtractor$1.class
android/support/multidex/MultiDexExtractor.class
android/support/multidex/ZipUtil$CentralDirectory.class
android/support/multidex/ZipUtil.class

• Add inside your libs folder the android-support-multidex.jar located here : ANDROID_HOME/extras/android/support/multidex/library/libs
• If you do not subclassing the Application class, add in your AndroidManifest.xml, into the application element, the attribut android:name="android.support.multidex.MultiDexApplication"
• If you are actually subclassing the Application class, make it extending the MultiDexApplication class.

Here you are, you do not have to bother anymore with dex limitation on number of methods. Keep in mind that it will only work on ICS (API 14) and above.

Again, please go read this awesome article of @alex_lipov to get the whole explanation.