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
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.
About This Article
Square had 60,000 lines of build logic that depended on Android Gradle Plugin APIs that were changing fast. The code wasn't well tested, and their single-threaded sync mechanism was becoming a bottleneck as the codebase grew.
Tony Robalik and Paul Hundal rewrote the build logic to use new parallel model building APIs from Gradle and Google. Pierre-Yves Ricau also found and fixed a critical memory leak in Electric Eel preview versions.
Michael Yoon's CI pipeline tested 72+ permutations of Kotlin, AGP, Gradle, and IDE versions using the Gradle Profiler tool. This gave the team confidence that the improvements would work across Square's complex development environment.