You can run gradlew -q dependencies app:dependencies
to see a the dependencies (including all transitive dependencies) for each of your configurations.
You can also specify a single configuration, such as with --configuration releaseCompile
In your case, you will find that Google Play Services includes a transitive dependency on AdMob.
You can mitigate this by using only individual components of Play Services (such as play-services-location
) instead of the entirety of Play Services. However, you may find that one of the individual components you use still relies on AdMob. For example, version 8.1.0 of play-services-analytics
has a transitive dependency on play-services-ads
, which is the AdMob SDK.