In your Android projects, you likely have many dependencies in your Gradle files. Updates often provide bugfixes or new features that you want to include in your app. However, checking for updates is not integrated by default. There is a solution though. Ben Manes wrote a Gradle Versions Plugin that does the work for you. To get started, add the buildscript dependency to your project’s gradle.build file and apply the plugin:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 apply plugin : 'com.github.ben-manes.versions' buildscript { repositories { jcenter ( ) } dependencies { classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:1.3.1' classpath 'com.github.ben-manes:gradle-versions-plugin:0.11.3' } }

Simple as that. Now you have a new gradle task dependencyUpdates to check for updated dependencies in your project.

For convenience, you can add a new Configuration via Run > Edit Configurations. When adding, choose Gradle as type and configure as shown in the picture, after selecting your Gradle project:

Now you can choose the Check dependencies configuration and run it.

After the task completes, a report is shown in the Gradle console, telling you which dependencies have updates ready for you to explore: