The Android Studio build system manages project dependencies and supports module dependencies, local binary dependencies, and remote binary dependencies.
An application module can include in its build file a list of other modules it depends on. When you build this module, the build system assembles and includes the required modules.
If you have binary archives in your local filesystem that a module depends on, such as JAR files, you can declare these dependencies in the build file for that module.
When some of your dependencies are available in a remote repository, you do not have to download them and copy them into your project. The Android Studio build system supports remote dependencies from repositories, such as Maven, and dependency managers, such as Ivy.
Many popular software libraries and tools are available in public Maven repositories. For these dependencies you only have to specify their Maven coordinates, which uniquely identify each element in a remote repository. The format for Maven coordinates used in the build system is group:name:version. For example, the Maven coordinates for version 16.0.1 of the Google Guava libraries are com.google.guava:guava:16.0.1.
The Maven Central Repository is widely used to distribute many libraries and tools.