I have added this line to my build.gradle
compile group: \'org.apache.httpcomponents\' , name: \'httpclient-android\' , version: \'4.3.5\'
I don't know why but (for now) httpclient can be compiled only as a jar into the libs directory in your project. HttpCore works fine when it is included from mvn like that:
dependencies { compile 'org.apache.httpcomponents:httpcore:4.4.3' }