You can exclude all of the transitive dependencies or just one by one, then include the desired version in your build.gradle file.
Method 1 - Excluding all dependencies of a lib
Use the transitive field to tell gradle you don't want the transitive dependencies to be resolved. The documentation of transitive says:
Sets whether this dependency should be resolved including or excluding its transitive dependencies. The artifacts belonging to this dependency might themselves have dependencies on other artifacts. The latter are called transitive dependencies.
Example:
compile('com.super.lib:awesome@aar') {
transitive = false
}
Method 2 - Pick which dependencies you don't want to include
Use the exclude method which:
Adds an exclude rule to exclude transitive dependencies of this dependency.
Example:
compile('com.super.lib:awesome@aar') {
exclude group: 'com.dont.want.this', module: 'old-artifact'
}
Note, however, that this does not guarantee that the excluded dependency won't be pulled in by another dependency. If you want to exclude a dependency from everywhere, use a configuration-wide exclusion strategy:
configurations.all {
exclude group: 'com.dont.want.this', module: 'old-artifact'
}
Also, you don't need to specify both group and module names. This example is from the JavaDoc of gradle:
dependencies {
compile('org.hibernate:hibernate:3.1') {
//excluding a particular transitive dependency:
exclude module: 'cglib' //by artifact name
exclude group: 'org.jmock' //by group
exclude group: 'org.unwanted', module: 'iAmBuggy' //by both name and group
}
}
WARNING
Just a friendly reminder about the dangers of changing dependency version numbers.
When you change dependency versions using this technique, you must test the app thoroughly because there can be breaking changes or unexpected behavior in the newer / older versions of the dependencies. It's pretty obvious that a major version number jump will likely result in crashes / unexpected behavior, but you must pay attention even to the patch part of the version number since the lib creator might have expected that the used version of the dependency had some bugs and included some fixes that might break the lib once the bug is fixed.
