Android Maven Plugin

Android Archives AAR

Android Maven Plugin can be used to both consume and produce Android Archives AAR. They are the new default way of sharing libraries as inspired by apklib and implemented and supported by the Android SDK.

Consume an AAR

Very simply just add the AAR as a dependency to your projects dependencies and set its type as aar (and add the android-maven-plugin to build/plugins section of your project). E.g.,

  <dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.android.gms</groupId>
    <artifactId>play-services</artifactId>
    <version>4.4.52</version>
    <type>aar</type>
  </dependency>

Produce an AAR

If you have a bunch of Java code that you want to share then the best solution is to create a Java project and publish as a plain Java archive (i.e. jar).

But if you have code plus Android resources that you want to share then you really want to share that as an Android archive (i.e. AAR). Fortunately this is easy.

Just add configure your project to have packaging aar (and add the android-maven-plugin to build/plugins section of your maven project). E.g.,

<project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

  <groupId>com.mycoolcompany</groupId>
  <artifactId>general-lib</artifactId>
  <version>1.2.3-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>aar</packaging>

  ...
</project>