cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release 
Cordova/Phonegap plugin for Android to align versions of the Play Services library components specified by other plugins to a specific version.
Table of Contents
Purpose
TL;DR: To prevent build failures caused by including different versions of Play Services library components.
Some Cordova plugins include the Play Services library to faciliate them. Most commonly, these are now included into the Cordova project by specifying them as Gradle dependencies (see the Cordova plugin spec documenation).
Example plugins:
The problem arises when these plugins specify different versions of the Play Services library components. This can cause build failures to occur, which are not easy to resolve without changes by the plugin authors to align the specified versions. See these issues:
To resolve these version collisions, this plugin injects a Gradle configuration file into the native Android platform project, which overrides any versions specified by other plugins, and forces them to the version specified in its Gradle file.
If you're encountering similar problems with the Android Support and/or Firebase libraries, checkout the sister plugins:
Caveats
Other plugins that reference the Firebase library
- If your project includes a plugin which uses the Firebase library (such as phonegap-plugin-push, cordova-plugin-fcm, cordova-plugin-firebase) you may find your build still fails.
- This is because the versions of the Play Services and Firebase libraries are related - see Android Library Versions for details.
- You can use cordova-android-firebase-gradle-release to override the Firebase SDK component versions to align with the Play Services library component versions specified via this plugin in order to resolve build issues.
Other plugins that reference the Google Services plugin
- There are certain Cordova plugins which reference the Google Services plugin in their Gradle config, for example:
- The Google Services plugin itself references a particular version of the Play Services library
- The version of Play Services library referenced depends on the version of the Google Services plugin referenced by the Cordova plugin.
- If a plugin (such as
cordova-plugin-fcm) is included into a Cordova project along with this plugin, then this plugin is unable to override the Play Services library version specified by the Google Services plugin. - Attempting to do this will result in a build failure with an error message such as
Found com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:12.+, but version 9.0.0 is needed for the google-services plugin. - The only solution you can implement using this plugin is to specify the same version as required by the Google Services plugin
- In the example error above, that would mean installing this plugin with:
cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release --variable play-services-location=9.0.0
- In the example error above, that would mean installing this plugin with:
Requirements
This plugin requires cordova@8+ (CLI) and cordova-android@7+ (Android platform).
Since the plugin uses hook scripts it will not work in Cloud Build environments such as Phonegap Build.
Installation
# override using default component versions
$ cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release
# override using custom component versions
$ cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release --variable play-services-location=17.0.0
Component versions
This plugin enables overriding the version of the following Play Services library components:
com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads
com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads-identifier
com.google.android.gms:play-services-ads-lite
com.google.android.gms:play-services-afs-native
com.google.android.gms:play-services-analytics
com.google.android.gms:play-services-analytics-impl
com.google.android.gms:play-services-appinvite
com.google.android.gms:play-services-audience
com.google.android.gms:play-services-auth
com.google.android.gms:play-services-auth-api-phone
com.google.android.gms:play-services-awareness
com.google.android.gms:play-services-base
com.google.android.gms:play-services-basement
com.google.android.gms:play-services-cast
com.google.android.gms:play-services-cast-framework
com.google.android.gms:play-services-clearcut
com.google.android.gms:play-services-cronet
com.google.android.gms:play-services-drive
com.google.android.gms:play-services-fido
com.google.android.gms:play-services-fitness
com.google.android.gms:play-services-flags
com.google.android.gms:play-services-games
com.google.android.gms:play-services-gass
com.google.android.gms:play-services-gcm
com.google.android.gms:play-services-identity
com.google.android.gms:play-services-iid
com.google.android.gms:play-services-instantapps
com.google.android.gms:play-services-location
com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps
com.google.android.gms:play-services-measurement
com.google.android.gms:play-services-measurement-api
com.google.android.gms:play-services-measurement-impl
com.google.android.gms:play-services-measurement-sdk
com.google.android.gms:play-services-measurement-sdk-api
com.google.android.gms:play-services-nearby
com.google.android.gms:play-services-oss-licenses
com.google.android.gms:play-services-panorama
com.google.android.gms:play-services-phenotype
com.google.android.gms:play-services-places
com.google.android.gms:play-services-places-placereport
com.google.android.gms:play-services-plus
com.google.android.gms:play-services-safetynet
com.google.android.gms:play-services-stats
com.google.android.gms:play-services-tagmanager
com.google.android.gms:play-services-tagmanager-api
com.google.android.gms:play-services-tagmanager-v4-impl
com.google.android.gms:play-services-tasks
com.google.android.gms:play-services-vision
com.google.android.gms:play-services-vision-common
com.google.android.gms:play-services-vision-image-label
com.google.android.gms:play-services-wallet
com.google.android.gms:play-services-wearable
Default version
By default, this plugin pins a recent version of each of the Play Services library components.
You can see what the currently pinned versions are by looking at the <preference>'s in the plugin.xml.
Other versions
You may want to specify a version of the Play Services library components - see here for a list recent versions.
Library component versions are specified in the Android build as Gradle artifacts in the format packageId:componentId:versionNumber, for example com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:17.0.0.
To override the default version when installing this plugin, specify a plugin variable where the variable key is the component ID and the value is the version number.
For example, if you want to install v17.0.0 of the Play Services library Location component, you'd specify the version via the variable:
cordova plugin add cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release --variable play-services-location=17.0.0
You can also specify the the overrides directly in the config.xml and this plugin will find them, for example:
<plugin name="cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release" spec="^4.0.0">
<variable name="play-services-location" value="17.0.0" />
</plugin>
Or in the package.json, e.g.:
{
"cordova": {
"plugins": {
"cordova-android-play-services-gradle-release": {
"play-services-location": "17.0.0"
}
}
}
}
Note: the plugin is case-insensitive to the component ID so PLAY-SERVICES-LOCATION or play-services-location will both work.
Credits
Thanks to Chris Scott, Transistor Software for his idea of extending the initial implementation to support dynamic specification of the library version via a plugin variable in cordova-google-api-version
License
The MIT License
Copyright (c) 2017 Dave Alden / Working Edge Ltd.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.