Updating Koin in Kotlin Apps: A Guide for Enterprise Teams

🔴The Problem: Caught Between Fast-Moving Tech Ecosystems and Business Requirements

Picture this:

• Your development team is ready to adopt the latest Koin features, but your compliance officer just shook their head.
• Your embedded Android devices can't afford a rollback if something goes wrong.
• Your banking application requires months of regulatory approval for each dependency update.

Sound familiar? 

When Updates Become Expensive Operations

The pain of updating libraries fluctuates, from "out of the question" to "please don't touch anything before next year."

Let's dig into a few typical updating-headache cases:

Embedded Android Systems: Every update is a high-stakes deployment. Limited rollback capabilities mean a single compatibility issue could brick devices in the field. The cost? Potential hardware issues and, most important, damaged customer relationships.

Regulated Industries: Banking, healthcare, and financial applications don't just update—they undergo extensive compliance reviews. Each dependency change triggers quality assurance processes that can take weeks, or even months, and cost thousands of dollars in administrative overhead.

Enterprise Development Cycles: While the open-source community releases updates every 6 months, enterprise planning cycles often span 12-18 months. The mismatch creates a constant state of technical debt and version management headaches.

The Engineering Leadership Dilemma

Engineering leaders face a double bind: when production issues arise with open-source dependencies, there's no one to call. These projects don't provide SLAs or legal guarantees, yet your team naturally can't have deep expertise in every library they're using—which is perfectly normal.

Complex dependency injection issues can spiral from minor problems into days of troubleshooting, leaving leaders accountable for problems they can't quickly resolve.

The Solution: Koin Long-Term Support - Enterprise-Grade Maintenance Without Compromise

Koin Long-Term Support is designed for Enterprise apps and provides:

• Professional support via a multi-channel hotline
• Audited Apache2 License, ensuring legal compliance
• Integration of critical fixes from subsequent Koin versions
• Continuous compatibility with the broader Kotlin ecosystem

Extended Support That Actually Matters

Koin 3.5 LTS Extended Through June 2026: Originally planned for 18 months, we're extending support based on enterprise feedback. This gives enterprises more time to evaluate and plan the migration to Koin 4.2

Expert-Backed Stability: When you encounter issues, you're not posting on Stack Overflow and hoping for answers. You have direct access to the team that built and maintains Koin, with legal commitments and SLA guarantees.

Expanding Coverage for Real-World Use Cases

Koin Annotations LTS (Coming End of 2025): With strong adoption among teams migrating from Dagger/Hilt to KMP/Koin, we're creating dedicated long-term support for annotation-based development workflows.

Koin Embedded LTS: As more SDKs and host applications use Koin simultaneously, dependency conflicts become a real challenge. Our Koin Embedded initiative addresses these scenarios with dedicated enterprise support.

The Best of Both Worlds

You don't have to choose between open-source and professional support & maintenance:

• Open-Source based: Apache2 transparency, access to source code guarantee
• Enterprise-tailored solution: Professional support, long-term maintenance, company-backed for legal compliance

What To Do If this Sounds like You?

If you're currently on Koin versions older than 3.5: Update to Koin 3.5.6 now. It's the most stable version in the Kotlin 1.x ecosystem and gives you the longest runway for future planning.

If you're in a regulated industry or managing embedded systems: Koin 3.5 LTS now supports you through June 2026, giving you the predictability your business requires.

If you're using Koin Annotations or managing complex SDK scenarios: Stay tuned for our expanded LTS  coming in 2025.

And then, enjoy peace of mind knowing you're backed on your DI

Talk to us about your Koin upgrade risks