Enforce gradle not to upgrade transitive dependencies

You can try using the Gradle strictly constraint when declaring the transitive dependency.

For example:

implementation 'org.apache.httpcomponents:httpclient:4.5.4'
implementation('commons-codec:commons-codec') {
   version {
     strictly '1.9'
   }
}

Here commons-code is an internal dependency of httpclient, by adding strictly constraint to commons-code, httpclient will be forced to use version 1.9 regardless of what is defined internally in its project.

You can find more details here

But let's say that in your case, dependency B is incompatible with an older version of Picasso, then you can extract one of the dependencies to a separate module and make the transitive dependency strict there.

Then you can either try adding the new module and see if it works or create the jar of the second dependency and add it to your project such that Gradle won't run conflict resolution in the first place

You can use strictly, for more you can refer below link https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/dependency_downgrade_and_exclude.html#sec:enforcing_dependency_version