I have an old project that am working at, I noticed that the .gradle folder has too many subfolders for each distribution of gradle I've changed in the past, is it safe to delete the old versions subfolders?

Inside the project you can find the .gradle folder.

Inside you can find all settings and other files used by gradle to build the project. You can delete these files without problems. Gradle will recreate it.

Also these file are not committed and Version Control Systems. It means that when you checkout the project these files are not present on the project.

Though its very old thread but recently I run into the issue when renamed my android application root name manually. Access Denied error coming on reopening in Android Studio for filehashes.lock under .gradle folder.

So followed below steps and it worked fine.

On restarting android studio, .gradle folder will be recreated.