How to add a maven manifest to an AAR which specifies dependencies

I was (finally) able to publish my Android library to an AWS S3 maven repository using this guide. It's published as an AAR instead of JAR file, which means that even though the generated POM file lists all its internal dependencies, they are ignored when adding the library to another project. Seems like a pretty common problem. I understand from this that I just need to list the dependencies in a maven manifest, but how is this done?

I'm really a newbie at this, so the simpler the better... Thanks!

Note: I also found this question, but I tried it and it didn't work. I'd like to avoid requiring people to add "transitive=true" in their build.gradle file anyway when adding my library.

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