Android Studio Unresolved reference: activity_main – R.layout and R.id

You can easily run into mysterious errors with Android Studio. Here is one.

Suddenly all references related to R.layout or R.id stopped to work and build failed with a message like this:

Compilation error. See log for more details
Unresolved reference: activity_main
Unresolved reference: url_edittext
Unresolved reference: update_button

The code looked like this:

    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)

I tried clean, builds, rebuilds. Nothing helped. The problem was caused by simple import which accidentally occurred in Activity file:

import android.R

After removing this line the whole project was working again and even code hinting was correct.