Android Studio Electric Eel Release Celebration
Article Summary
Roger Hu from Square reveals how Android Studio Electric Eel slashed their sync times by 60%. For a team managing 3,000+ Gradle subprojects, that's not just faster—it's 1,600 hours of developer time saved annually.
Square's mobile team has been battling IDE sync times that ballooned to 9 minutes as their codebase grew to 4,400 modules. With Electric Eel's new parallel project import feature, they finally got relief. This post details their journey from pain point to solution, including the patches and benchmarks they contributed to make it work.
Key Takeaways
- Sync times dropped from 9 minutes to 3.5 minutes on 3,000+ Gradle subprojects
- Square contributed memory leak fixes and patches to Electric Eel release candidates
- Built CI pipeline testing 72+ permutations of Kotlin, AGP, Gradle, and IDE versions
- Codebase grew 144% to 4,400 modules over two years, doubling sync times
Critical Insight
Android Studio Electric Eel's parallel import feature saves Square's developers 1,600 hours per year by cutting sync times 60% on massive codebases.
