Be wary of Android SDK updates

Android SDK contains all of the build tools and libraries necessary to create Android apps.

The Android SDK Manager is used to pull updates to those tools and libraries and Google supplies the libraries via 2 artifact repositories. This is a good thing as you get the benefits of artifact versioning etc. (NB I won't rant here about why these artifact repositories should be global instead of machine local - suffice to say it is a barrier to dev, particularly open source dev).

The problem is that the Android SDK Manager doesn't behave like a well mannered repository manager when it is updating it's 2 repos.

It should just download the new library versions and place them within the repo.

Instead it removes the repo and recreates it from a combination of

• new libraries
• existing libraries that it thinks should be there

If you have added artifacts to your Google repos, to get around Issue#72807 for instance, then you will have lost those artifacts and will need to recreate them.

So lessons from this:

1. Don't rely on Android SDK Manager to be a good citizen. Store those modified Google artifacts in a separate repository of your own (mea culpa).
2. Google - fix Issue#72807 so we don't have to individually create modified Google artifacts. With the advent of PlayServices-6.5.87 there are 17+ more artifacts that have invalid dependency information.