The Android Maven Plugin is used to build applications for the Android operating system as well as build libraries to be used in these efforts in AAR and the legacy APKLIB format using Apache Maven.
The plugin includes numerous features with some minimal setup for usage. The main tasks are creating an application or a library for reuse:
Create an Android application using apk packaging
Create an Android Archive for code/resources reuse using aar packaging
Create an Android Application Library (to be deprecated) for code/resources reuse using apklib packaging
It includes support for running instrumentation tests, analysis with Android Lint, processing with ProGuard and many other tasks.
Supplementary tasks helping these efforts supported are:
Android SDK r21.1 or later, latest is best supported
Java Development Kit 1.7 - 1.8 as supported by the Android SDK
Apache Maven 3.0.5+
Environment variables and PATH settings:
Set ANDROID_HOME to point to the path of your installed Android SDK
$ANDROID_HOME/tools as well as $ANDROID_HOME/platform-tools to your $PATH
Or on Windows %ANDROID_HOME%\tools and %ANDROID_HOME%\platform-tools
Optionally Android NDK and ANDROID_NDK_HOME set
The best examples for project setups are the example projects that are part of the plugin code base and are run with each build and release.
Plugin goal documentation on this site
Via the help goal of the plugin itself
Specific guides and articles on this site
Join and contribute on the Maven Android Developers mailing list
Documentation in the Android Development with Apache Maven chapter in the book Maven: The Complete Reference. As of 2015 this is a bit out of date.