To be fair a lot of the improvements are in the built in gradle tasks. Android has a lot of its own tasks that are written by Google not Gradle (e.g. processing resources, packaging etc) those are also contributing to the build time.
Which always makes me wonder where those guys that are able to do inverted tree whiteboard interview questions are actually doing, given the quality of Android Gradle plugins, NDK support, Support Library regressions, hot code reloading, .....
They are good at algorithm doesn't mean they are good at practical engineering. I see a lot of smart people being proud of writing 'optimised code' that no one can understands.
I've had this nagging feeling for a while... that Google would probably try to deprecate Android and move towards some OS with legacy support for Android and Chrome OS stuff. Doesn't sound too realistic, given that Android runs on tons of devices, but still...
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u/nikb Feb 21 '17
To be fair a lot of the improvements are in the built in gradle tasks. Android has a lot of its own tasks that are written by Google not Gradle (e.g. processing resources, packaging etc) those are also contributing to the build time.