Dependency missing but exists in APK, how?

Question

I have a MyLocationService library, which has dependency from huawei_location_service.Inside I have HMSLocationService class which is the only one using huawei_location_service classes and I use relfection to access that class. Meaning is, if we run app on Huawei and if there is dependency from huawei_location_service, I will get location, otherwise will not. And application should run perfectly on non-hauwei devices without dependency from huawei_location_service.

So when I build MyLocationService.aar I removed huawei_location_service dependency from it's pom file. After that I created a new application and added dependency from MyLocationService.aar. When I check dependencies with command gradlew app:dependencies I don't see any dependency from huawei, but when I create an apk and analyze it, in classes.dex there are classes from huawei_location_service.

Question: How it is possible? And is there any other way to achieve what I want?

P.S. I analyzed also MyLocationService.aar, didn't find any huawei dependency. Is there another way to check dependencies of *.aar files instead of pom or analyzing tool of android studio?

Answer 1

So if someone will be mistaken as me, this answer will help.

The repositories and classes I saw in classes.dex were not coming from hms libraries. As I have imports in my custom classes, that imports' texts were the reason I was seeing huawei folder in classes.dex. Also take attention on the size, and you can see that they are kind of 20 bytes.

So I removed the imports, generate my library again, created apk and analyzed it and woala, no huawei folder is visible.

P.S. *.aars doesn't contain any library if you not put transitive=true. And you need to add dependencies required by your lib in your own applicaiton.

P.S.S. If you have locally or globally publishing your library, maven(Gradle uses maven) creates metadata, so called POM file, as a helper to identify all dependencies that the library needs.