The dreaded UNEXPECTED TOP-LEVEL EXCEPTION

I'm working on extracting library projects to factor out common code shared between multiple projects. With everything compiling successfully I attempted to run my apk project in an emulator, and got hit with the following:

UNEXPECTED TOP-LEVEL EXCEPTION:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: 
  already added: 
    Lcom/android/vending/licensing/Manifest$permission;

Now it seems there's been a lot of problems with this recently due to changes in ADT, but the added complexity of Maven in my setup throws a few more spanners into the machinery. Robert Schmid describes a project hierarchy very similar to mine here, and actually gave me the final clue I needed to unravel the mess.

The difference between my situation and Robert's is that I'm using Maven for release builds and continuous integration - and so far its proving to be ... tricky ... to get the combination of Eclipse, Maven and ADT to play well together.

I got the dreaded UNEXPECTED TOP-LEVEL EXCEPTION because somewhere in the build cycle the Maven-Eclipse plugin is injecting its apklib dependencies into my eclipse build as well as the referenced projects in Eclipse. Having finally worked out what was causing my problem it was pretty easy to resolve:

• right-click the project, select properties
• go to the Maven pane
• uncheck "Resolve dependencies from workspace projects"
• repeat for all of the apklib projects referenced by your apk project

The down-side of this is that if I make changes in my eclipse apklib projects I have to build the jars with Maven before the changes are available to the dependent apk projects. I actually slightly prefer working this way anyway - I find that a little bit of isolation helps.

I should probably point out that I am using Maven-3.0.3, the m2eclipse and m2e-android Eclipse plugins, and the very latest SDK at time of writing (r16). YMMV.