Error:Cause: invalid stream header: 000900D9 in android studio 2.3.1

I was facing the same problem and was not able to figure out what exactly causes this problem.

But removing the whole .gradle folder (/home/$USER/.gradle in my case) and rebuilding the app fixed it.

I noticed that many users (me included) faced this issue using the 3.3 gradle version; update to 3.5 and it will be fine

Go to your console, run

./gradlew --stacktrace

If it says

GradleException: Could not read cache value from '[...]/.gradle/daemon/3.3/registry.bin'

go to this folder and delete the file registry.bin.lock. No need to delete the whole .gradle directory and download everything again.