How Tokopedia Achieved 1000% Faster iOS Build Time
Article Summary
Tokopedia's iOS team turned 90-minute builds into 5 minutes. Yes, you read that right: a 1000% improvement.
Indonesia's largest e-commerce platform was drowning in build times that killed productivity. With 40 developers and a weekly release cycle, their CI queues became a nightmare. Here's how they escaped.
Key Takeaways
- Migrated from Xcode to Bazel build system with remote caching
- Initial 500% speedup, then 1000% total with distributed cache layer
- Forked Bazel to support mixed Swift and Objective-C codebase
- Built custom tool to auto-generate build rules for dependencies
- Six month migration with dedicated team paid off massively
Critical Insight
Tokopedia reduced iOS build times from 50+ minutes to under 5 minutes by switching to Bazel with remote caching.
