All of the android-* packages must be updated to the latest version at the same time. It is more unpredictable to have android-* packages at different upstream versions since no one is running that configuration, and upstream does not do anything to support that (e.g. no versioned ABI, etc). Therefore, the ABI is guaranteed to be compatible since they'll all be built together.
In practice, this means that the process of updating to the latest upstream version has to start from the most core packages, then progress to the ones that depend on it. That said, this private shared library arrangement allows for security patches in the android shared code to be applied without having to rebuild everything.
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