// the find
mikepenz/AboutLibraries
AboutLibraries automatically collects all dependencies and licenses of any gradle project (Kotlin MultiPlatform), and provides easy to integrate UI components for Android and Compose Multiplatform environments
AboutLibraries is a Gradle plugin + runtime library that collects dependency and license metadata at compile time and renders it in a scrollable UI for Android and Compose Multiplatform apps. It's the standard solution for the 'show your open source licenses' screen that app stores increasingly expect. If you ship a KMP app and need to satisfy license attribution requirements without doing it by hand, this is what you reach for.
The compile-time collection approach means zero runtime overhead — the JSON is baked into the APK as a raw resource. The strict mode in the Gradle plugin, which fails the build if unlicensed or disallowed dependencies are included, is genuinely useful for teams with compliance requirements rather than just a checkbox feature. KMP+wasm support is real, not a stub — the desktop and wasm sample apps are in the repo and the multiplatform source sets are fully implemented. The `duplicationMode = MERGE` option for handling split dependencies (e.g., the same library published under multiple artifacts) actually works and saves significant manual cleanup in large projects.
The plugin split in v13 (main plugin vs. android plugin) is a breaking change that is easy to get wrong and the migration guide buries the lede — you find out your metadata stopped generating automatically only after a build succeeds silently. License detection is only as good as what's in each dependency's POM file, and the README itself warns that dependencies with missing or malformed pom.xml entries will be silently dropped; you're expected to audit manually with `findLibraries` on every dependency update. Remote license fetching via the GitHub API requires a PAT configured in your build script, which is awkward for CI and means some teams just leave it off. The AGP 9.0 resource shrinking footgun — where the generated JSON gets pruned out of the APK unless you add a keep rule — is documented but is the kind of thing that bites you in release builds after passing all debug testing.