LogCat message: The Google Play services resources were not found. Check your project configuration to ensure that the resources are included

Google Mobile Ads SDK FAQ states that:

I keep getting the error 'The Google Play services resources were not found. Check your project configuration to ensure that the resources are included.'

You can safely ignore this message. Your app will still fetch and serve banner ads.

So if you included the google-play-services_lib correctly, and you're getting ads, you have nothing to worry about (I guess...)

This is a bug in the Google Play services library, and it is filed here under issue 755.

Unfortunately, there isn't any solution yet.

I just ran into this problem this morning and seemed very strange since my application was working fine up until today. I was getting the exact same "The Google Play services resources were not found..." message.

I tried opening the regular Google Maps application to see if I could get my location, but it wouldn't find it. Even after waiting 5 minutes, which is more than enough time to normally get a location from even the service provider via cell tower. So I checked Location Services.

Anyway, the problem turned out to be that on my S3 under Location Services -> Google Location Services. It was not checked. The other two location options were checked (VZW Location Services and Standalone GPS Services), but the last one, Google Location Services was not. After turning that on, the regular Google Maps could find my location and my application could find my location and the problem went away.

The error message pops up due to:

mMap.setMyLocationEnabled(true);

when Google Location Services is not enabled.

After doing some more testing it looks like if the current location is null (cannot be determined from all sources) then you will get this error when trying to turn on setMyLocationEnabled.

I have decompiled Google Play services revision 14 library. I think there is a bug in com.google.android.gms.common.GooglePlayServicesUtil.class. The aforementioned string appears only in one place:

public static int isGooglePlayServicesAvailable(Context context) {
    PackageManager localPackageManager = context.getPackageManager();
    try {
        Resources localResources = context.getResources();
        localResources.getString(R.string.common_google_play_services_unknown_issue);
    } catch (Throwable localThrowable1) {
        Log.e("GooglePlayServicesUtil", "The Google Play services resources were not found. "
                + "Check your project configuration to ensure that the resources are included.");
    }
....

There is no R.class in com.google.android.gms.common package.

There is an import com.google.android.gms.R.string;, but no usage of string.something, so I guess this is the error - there should be import com.google.android.gms.R;.

Nevertheless the isGooglePlayServicesAvailable method works as intended (except of logging that warning), but there are other methods in that class, which uses unimported R.class, so there may be some other errors. Although banners in my application works fine...