What type of pattern is dependency injection?

Preamble: Dependency Injection vs Service Locator One thing to note is out of the three, technically only Dagger uses a dependency injection (DI) pattern; Koin and Kodein are service locators .

Service Locator is a dangerous pattern because it almost works . You can locate Dependencies from consuming classes, and you can replace those Dependencies with different implementations — even with Test Doubles from unit tests.

Because of this, Dagger is not a clean DI but it does provide a good enough service in a special environment like Android. And now, we will look at Koin, why it is not called a Dependency Injector but a Service Locator .

Dependency Injection (DI) is a design pattern used to implement IoC . It allows the creation of dependent objects outside of a class and provides those objects to a class through different ways. Using DI, we move the creation and binding of the dependent objects outside of the class that depends on them.