Blazing Fast Android Builds

Google I/O 2017 saw the release of Android Gradle plugin 3.0 preview, built on Gradle 4.0 M2, delivering major build performance improvements. The key change is variant-aware dependency management, which eliminates the need to resolve dependencies at configuration time, fixing a combinatorial explosion problem in multi-module projects. In a 130-subproject app, configuration time dropped from 3 minutes to under 2 seconds, clean build time from 5+ minutes to ~1 minute, and incremental builds with a single-line change now take ~9 seconds. Additional gains come from compile avoidance, incremental dexing, and Gradle build cache support, which cut clean build time further from 60s to ~20s. Developers are encouraged to try the preview, modularize their apps, and split api/implementation dependencies for maximum gains.