Excluding New Dependencies in Gradle File - kotlin

Question

I have an app that runs perfectly without new dependencies like this one:
A newer version of androidx.navigation:navigation-fragment-ktx than 2.4.2 is available: 2.5.0
If I upgrade to v.2.5.0, my app has warnings about unrelated elements like for example references to menu objects.
Should I wait and allow these Gradle warnings such as above notice until another upgrade comes along and try the new dependency then?

Answer 1

You shouldn't need to update anything unless you have a reason to. It's often a good idea (as well as new features you also get bug fixes) but it's usually not required. Specifying all your dependency versions means you get a repeatable build that should always work, so long as those versions are available
The thing about libraries is they often have dependencies on other libraries, and updating one might introduce a requirement for other stuff to be updated (which might be why you're seeing other errors appear. That broadly shouldn't happen (making things independently updateable is part of the reason for breaking everything out into separate libraries!) but here's a blog post from when they introduced it:
Starting with the AndroidX refactor, library versions have been reset from 28.0.0 to 1.0.0. Future updates will be versioned on a per-library basis, following strict semantic versioning rules where the major version indicates binary compatibility. This means, for example, that a feature may be added to RecyclerView and used in your app without requiring an update to every other library used by your app. This also means that libraries depending on androidx may provide reasonable guarantees about binary compatibility with future releases of AndroidX -- that a dependency on a 1.5.0 revision will still work when run against 1.7.0 but will likely not work against 2.0.0.
Really you have to look at the release notes for a library to see if there are any breaking changes you need to worry about. For example, here's the one for the Activity Jetpack component and if you search "dependency changes" you'll see where updating actually requires a specific minimum version of another thing
Also sometimes a library will pull in an old version of another library it depends on, so you might be explicitly interacting with a very old version of a component just because you never added it as a dependency yourself. Then if that first library requires a much newer version of that dependency, you might suddenly get a large jump that requires a bunch of changes to your code, even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with what you updated!