Including Play Services
I needed to use the new Location Settings Dialog in an app recently. It’s only available now in play services 7x, so I updated the dependency in build gradle and hooked it up.
compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:7.5.0' So right away this immediately puts you over the dex limit but you can now enable multi-dex to fix that and use proguard to trim away all the unused library code.
Everything was nice and smooth until a week later at about midnight as I was uploading the final build to the Play Store. I suddenly noticed something very wrong in the permissions listed for my application. There were 2 new permissions:
android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS
android.permission.USE_CREDENTIALS Uh, what’s this? I’m asking for permissions for get the user accounts and use their credentials? These are some of the strongest permissions you can have. They are shown to the user with very scary wording and will be absolutely sure to generate a very harsh response (think thousands of 1-star reviews coming in a flood).
So, it is midnight, I’m up against a deadline, and I can’t ship this. What happened? I checked the manifest file in the APK and sure enough those permissions are listed even though I’m not declaring them myself.
Google Wallet: Doing More Harm than Good Since 2011
Continuing to search around I found these listed in: build/intermediates/exploded-aar/com.google.android.gms/play-services-wallet/7.5.0. Wait, Google Wallet? I don’t want that and I don’t need it. I was just relying on Proguard optimizations to remove the code I’m not using, but it never even occurred to me that there would be problems with manifest merging that I had to deal with.
Luckily there is a way to include only the Play Services components you need by including just the dependencies you are using:
compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-base:7.5.0'
compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:7.5.0' That excludes wallet and all the other bloatware included in the library. So that fixed that.
The Revenge of Google Wallet
I triumphantly clicked the build and looked forward to getting some sleep. That’s when I got hit with a total bizarre error message:
res/values/colors.xml: Error:(1) Attribute "theme" has already been defined Argh… how can me only including a subset of what I had before now cause a duplicate definition?.
After lots of guesswork and failed trial and error I discovered that my old dependency on segment.io was including Play Services library and it was now including the full version of an older library since I wasn’t.
And of course… yep it is our friend Google Wallet was again the problem. I found an attribute “theme” defined in Wallet’s attrs.xml. Defining an attribute named “theme” is not the best idea ever, since it has to be used by the AppCompat library to replace the Android system theme attribute. So this file has the problem:
build\intermediates\exploded-aar\com.google.android.gms\play-services\5.0.89\res\values\wallet-attrs.xml I fixed the issue by replacing this:
compile('io.segment.analytics.android:all:1.4.4@aar') With this:
compile('com.segment.analytics.android:analytics-core:3.1.3@aar')And I believe Google Wallet can’t touch me now.