My case was something like in a main project I had a `@Component`which returned a LeakCanary's

RefWatcher

and dependency on leak canary was transitively acquired from my custom library. Then I removed LeakCanary from my lib, but forgot to add a corresponding explicit

compile

to the main project and this caused the same error as you were getting. After adding explicit

comple com.leakcanary.blablabla

the error was gone. I am not sure how it is related to you reproduction steps though. It also looks a bit similar to what Hannes D's issue is about.