So many AndroidDev joking about Android Studio heater

Android Gradle Builds won’t be faster, here is why

One of the biggest pain point for Android Developers is the build time. This is a real concern, so why despite the successive versions of Gradle and Android Gradle Plugin, building an Android app takes so long?

Android Studio, your winter heater

It has been a running joke for a few years now, Android Studio, or more precisely Gradle, is using the CPU intensively, resulting in most computers to overheat and requiring their fan system to go at full speed (especially MacBook Pro Intel edition).

This is a reality, a thing that Android Developers experience everyday, with computers becoming incredibly hot, and this gets even worse during summer days. Obviously, such situation is very far from the ideal work environment. To add to that, build time seems to become slower and slower, day after day, version after version.

Gradle, a Java tool

When looking a little closer, we can notice that when a Gradle task is started, Java is started too.

java process when ./gradlew assembleDebug is running

We can see that the CPU is used at more than 700% by Java. Thanks to multi-core / multi-thread…