Android .aar dependencies aren't resolving in app project that depends on .aar

My goal is to distribute an .aar file that can be used by other developers in their projects. The problem I am running into is that when a developer wants to integrate my .aar into their application, they need to specify all of the dependencies in their build.gradle file that I have already included in my .aar build.gradle. My goal is to let the developer only include my library as a dependency and somehow the libraries that my library depends on will magically get included in that developer’s project.

For example, my library defines the following dependencies in its build.gradle file:

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    compile ('com.android.support:support-v4:21.0.+')
    compile ('com.readystatesoftware.sqliteasset:sqliteassethelper:2.0.1')
    compile ('org.apache.commons:commons-math3:3.3')
    compile ('com.google.code.gson:gson:2.3')
}

I wrote a test app that uses my library. My understanding is that I if I include my library as a dependency, then by proxy, I will also get the rest of the dependencies that the library depends on so what I want to be able to do is the following:

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.aar'])
    compile name:'app-offline-debug', ext:'aar'
}

However, this does not work. I get java.lang.VerifyErrors at runtime. What ends up working is to include this in the app’s build.gradle file:

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.aar'])
    compile name:'app-offline-debug', ext:'aar'
    compile 'com.android.support:support-v4:21.0.+'
    compile 'com.readystatesoftware.sqliteasset:sqliteassethelper:2.0.1'
    compile 'org.apache.commons:commons-math3:3.3'
    compile 'com.google.code.gson:gson:2.3'
}

Why do I need to include dependencies in both the .aar and the final application? What am I not understanding about how dependencies work? Why isn’t the final application able to grab the .aar’s dependencies from maven at build time?