Not able to remove transitive dependency from gradle in an Android Project

I am trying to remove the transitive dependencies from my Android project and for some reason exclude is not working when i try to remove a dependency from my particular dependency.

For example i want to remove support-annotations from my project

if i use

configurations {
    all*.exclude group: 'com.android.support', module:'support-annotations'
}

The dependency gets excluded and from the dependency tree. i can see the dependency tree by using ./gradlew app:dependencies

But if i use

 compile('com.android.support:support-v4:23.4.0')
            {
                exclude group: 'com.android.support', module:'support-annotations'
            }

Then i still see the dependency in the dependency tree.

So my question is that why is it not working when i try to remove the dependency from a particular dependency ?

Update 1:

Also can anyone tell me what does the star (*) symbol next to dependency in the tree represent ?

Update 2

I am also using Fresco I tried the same thing with Fresco and exclude rule seems to work for it

Dependency Tree of Fresco

Dependency Tree when i exclude imagepipeline-base in Fresco

compile("com.facebook.fresco:fresco:0.9.0")
            {
                exclude group: 'com.facebook.fresco', module: 'imagepipeline-base'
            }

As you can see the imagepipeline-base dependency gets excluded. So i don't know why this doesn't work for Android Support Annotations transitive dependency

So i have figured this out with the help of one of my friends. The reason why i was not able to remove support-annotation was because most of the other dependencies were using support-v4 as transitive dependency and those support-v4 also had their own copy of support-annotation.

Now there are 2 solutions to this

Solution 1:

exclude support-annotation from all the dependencies that containsupport-v4 as transitive dependency.

Solution 2:

exclude support-annotation only from my support-v4 dependency and remove support-v4 dependency from all other dependencies that have support-v4 as transitive dependency.

Note: Using one of the above approaches i was able to solve my problem and figure out how we can remove transitive dependencies when they are referenced from multiple dependencies.

And regarding the ( * ) symbol it means that the dependency tree is for that dependency is already shown. Instead of showing the whole tree for those dependencies again gradle shows ( * ) symbol with them.

Sample build.gradle file is available here