3 Years of Android Development at Traveloka
Article Summary
Ahmad Fadli Basyari from Traveloka watched build times balloon from 3 minutes to 10 minutes as the app grew from 3 products to 20+. His team's solution? Rewrite the entire app twice in three years.
Traveloka's Android team scaled from 5 to 30+ engineers between 2015-2018, shipping 60 releases and growing from a messy single-module app to a sophisticated multi-module architecture. The journey involved two complete rewrites, multiple failed attempts at modularization, and hard lessons about technical debt.
Key Takeaways
- First modularization attempt failed: still hit 65k method limit despite multi-module design
- Separating by feature (not layer) cut build time from 10 minutes to 2-3 minutes
- DataBinding generated 7,500+ duplicate classes (15 modules × 500 XMLs) causing memory crashes
- No-op modules let developers mock unused products during development for faster builds
- Multi-module forced better practices: coding against interfaces instead of direct coupling
Critical Insight
Traveloka reduced build times by 70% through feature-based modularization, but only after learning that layer-based separation and premature optimization don't scale.
