Today I discover an “experimental” feature in Android Studio. Since version 2.2, there is a new Project Structure dialog that allows update dependencies and get information about new releases.

I first assumed that the code editor in Android Studio follows something like Semantic Versioning in order to highlight minor update in dependencies, but not latest patches and beta (even alpha) versions, but that is not the case.

Android Studio will only highlight dependencies that Gradle consider as “promoted”. That means that “Gradle found some dependency conflict, and used default conflict resolution strategy, which is to prefer a newer version of some dependency” (thanks Stanislav @ StackOverflow for your answer here. More information about dependency resolution here.

To enable it go to Preferences > Build, Execution, Deployment > Gradle > Experimental and check Use new ‘Project Structure’ dialog.

Hope you find it useful!