The recently released version of Google Play Services presents itself as a library project with string and attribute resources coupled with a .jar in the libs/ folder that has been compiled against internal APIs.

While this is convenient for users of IDEs or Ant, it presents a problem for those using proper build systems (e.g., Maven, Gradle) with dependency management. Inside the .jar there are a lot of classes which reference static attributes on the com.google.android.gsm.R class. This means that the library must exist in a project which declares that package in its manifest (thus causing aapt to generate an R.java for it). While this makes sense, it presents a problem for users of artifact repositories.

If you use Maven, you can do the following in order to depend on Google Play Services as a library project:

1. Copy the gms-mvn-install.sh script into the google-play-services_lib/ folder inside of your SDK.
2. Execute ./gms-mvn-install.sh which will install the project into your local Maven repository. If you want to deploy the artifacts to a remote repository then execute ./gms-mvn-install.sh repo-id repo-url.

Once completed you can depend on this library project with the following dependency declaration:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.google.android.gms</groupId>
  <artifactId>google-play-services</artifactId>
  <version>7</version>
  <type>apklib</type>
</dependency>