Short and sweet! I just needed to remove the create function’s Class argument ignore null value safety ? and the ViewModelFactory is working.

class CustomViewModelFactory(private val repository: SomeRepository)
    : ViewModelProvider.NewInstanceFactory() {
    override fun <T : ViewModel?> create(modelClass: Class<T>): T = SomeViewModel(repository) as T
}

Update 2/24/20

I’ve used the latest Lifecycle 2.2.0 release in order to add both custom parameters and Saved State to the ViewModel component.

See: Optimizing Android ViewModel with Lifecycle 2.2.0 🤖🧰