Hey levlaz,
Resurrecting an old thread here, but there are a couple threads about this issue and no really good answers. The problem with gradle is that it downloads dependencies on-demand, not when you call “gradle dependencies”. So with the default CircleCI approach of using “gradle test” in the test phase, any test-time dependencies will be resolved during testing, and that is after CircleCI caches the dependencies. As a result, the test dependencies are downloaded on every build.
Other threads about this issue:
https://discuss.circleci.com/t/effective-caching-for-gradle/540
There also does not seem to be a way to make gradle download all dependencies proactively. So… it seems like the best approach to using gradle on CircleCI is to run all of your commands in the “dependencies” section, or live with dependencies being downloaded on every build. 
It would be great if you could specify when dependency caching happens in circle.yml. Or, provide a shell script we could call to perform the dependency cache when we want. Or… if someone found a way to make gradle force all its dependencies to be resolved at once.