Gradle gets stuck at either 'build' or 'assembleDebug' when using the 64bit or 32bit version of Android Studio

I was experiencing the same problem, and the solution was very unexpected in my case: AVAST antivirus was somehow interfering with the Gradle:build process. Deactivating this antivirus solved the problem!

Because there is no answer to this problem I will share, what I have done, to solve this issue. From what I have seen, the problem is that there is a dependancy(or many) from a maven repo that can not be loaded. So you have to take all dependacy one by one and check if exist on the maven repo.

For example I was having a dependancy for "org.jraf:android-switch-backport:1.3.1" from "http://JRAF.org/static/maven/2" that at that time could not be opened.

My build.gradle looked like this:

  repositories {
      mavenCentral()
      maven {
        url "http://JRAF.org/static/maven/2"
      }
  }

  compile "org.jraf:android-switch-backport:1.3.1

For me, this problem occurred when I was USB tethering using an Android device. The first build took anywhere from 5-10 minutes, and every subsequent build took about 3-7 seconds. I found that by disabling USB tethering, the first build completed quickly (and so would all subsequent builds). After the first build completed, I could reenable USB tethering.