Dagger works fine with multiple modules in fact you can use this example. My company is building a completely open source app for the art institute of Chicago: github.com/art-institute-of-chicago/aic-mobile-android I do most of the code reviews and we welcome all contributions once development slows down

All your modules are using KAPT

Yes most of them

I thought the idea was to leave a few modules with KAPT and have most of them clean of annotation processors

The ones that have dagger modules yeah they have kapt. Not all of them do

When you have granular modules their use of kapt becomes mostly irrelevant because they can be individually cached to avoid compilation altogether and when they do require it they can be built in parallel with others

Dagger works, but if you use dagger-android or Subcomponents each change of this subscomponent cause your module with app component recompilation

dagger-android is a huge win because it means you can move individual activities and fragments to their own modules

shouldnt be so bad if your app module component is a shell that just ties everything together

you almost never want dagger-android if your activities and fragments are in the same Gradle module as their enclosing application/activity. you're just adding abstraction for no purpose.

Yes, dagger-android easily allows you to extract fragments/activities, but in terms of incremental compilation Component works better than Subcomponent, this is especially the thing if you have a lot of subcomponents, so change of any of them cause AppComponent recompilation.

and since its runtime checking for those bindings, you can run into runtime exceptions if you forget to include the

ContributesAndroidInjector

in your module

but it doesn't really matter because your app module will be mostly empty and just tie together the other modules which can all run in parallel

shouldnt be so bad if your app module component is a shell that just ties everything together

It’s true, but if you have legacy application where most of code still in App module, don’t expect immediate build improvement

yeah! I get like sub 20 second builds in our AIC project when changing a feature leaf even though it depends on app

but if you have a legacy app with most of the code in the app module you shouldn't be using dagger-android anyway. and modularization is what you should be focusing on. incremental <insert anything> isn't going to be a big win ever in that case.

yeah, modularization can be interesting, but it does uncover a lot of tangled dependencies you might have and youll start seeing some great improvements