How We Improved Our iOS App Compile Time by 99%
Article Summary
Zomato's iOS team was stuck waiting 80 seconds for every incremental build. That's developer productivity bleeding out in real-time.
The Zomato engineering team documented their journey from painfully slow build times to sub-second incremental builds. They tackled everything from Xcode configuration to architectural changes across their entire iOS codebase.
Key Takeaways
- Incremental builds dropped from 80 seconds to 0.8 seconds (99% faster)
- Enabled Xcode's new build system for 80% speedup on incremental builds
- Converted third party dependencies to prebuilt dynamic frameworks
- Split bloated internal frameworks to improve build parallelization
- Bonus wins: 6MB smaller app size and 400ms faster launch times
Zomato cut iOS build times by 99% through a combination of Xcode settings optimization, modular architecture, and eliminating unnecessary compilation work.
About This Article
Zomato's iOS developers were stuck waiting 200 seconds for cold start builds. This slowed down iteration cycles across teams working in a fast-moving environment.
The team made several changes to Xcode's debug configuration. They disabled dsyms, switched to incremental compilation with optimizations enabled, and limited builds to active architectures only. These adjustments cut down on unnecessary compilation work.
Cold start builds dropped from 200 seconds to 95 seconds, a 52.5% improvement. Clean builds went from 170 seconds down to 81 seconds. The faster build times let developers iterate more quickly across the iOS organization.