As stated by Christian Mitchell the problem is due to the google play services latest version. And the solution is to force the version used in our project.

Adding googlePlayServicesVersion = "17.+" in the project build.gradle file might fix the issue for most of people but in my case it was not enough.

Using ./gradlew app:dependencies I notices that a module (react-native-activity-recognition) was referencing gms as follow : api 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-location:+' and therefore the latest version was still used globally

So the final solution for me was to target this module in the app build.gradle and prevent it from embedding gms as follow :

implementation (project(path: ':react-native-activity-recognition')) {
    exclude group: 'com.google.android.gms', module: 'play-services-location'
}