How We Cut the Build Time for Our Android App by 95%
Article Summary
Zomato's Android team was losing 7 hours of productivity every single day just waiting for builds. A 10-person team, 20 builds per day, 2+ minutes each time. The math was brutal.
The Zomato engineering team tackled their massive Android app build times (29 modules, 1.2M lines of code). They used Gradle profiling and build scans to diagnose bottlenecks, then systematically eliminated wasted work.
Key Takeaways
- Build time dropped from 2 minutes 18 seconds to just 7 seconds
- Fixed dependency graph using implementation vs api to enable parallel builds
- Removed Firebase Perf and NewRelic plugins from debug builds (saved 40 seconds)
- Eliminated changing BuildConfig variables that invalidated incremental compilation
- Android Instant Run now works, dramatically improving UI iteration speed
Critical Insight
Zomato cut Android build times by 95% (from 138 seconds to 7 seconds) by fixing their module dependencies, removing debug build overhead, and enabling incremental compilation.
