project needs resources for various screen densities
sorry to open all of these issues - what I should do is fork the project with gdx added and this issue resolved.
When building on newer devices with high dpi screens, the user will get a notification like this when attempting to run 'installDebug'.
Could not find build of variant which supports density 480 and an ABI in armeabi-v7a, armeabi
The reason for this has nothing to do with the compiled shared libraries - it's can't find the desired icons/dimensions file.
I was able to resolve the problem by adding the 'mipmap-xxdpi' folders and others containing icons from one of the basic android studio example projects. There was also a 'values-w820dp' folder with a 'dimens.xml' file in it that might also have been important, not sure.
Having the icons for various screen sizes and the 'dimens.xml' file resolved the issue and I was able to run the app with remote debugging. Those resource files should be added to the repo so nobody runs into that error.