Someone at Google: how do we make Android build times quicker?

Someone else at Google: we could make a new button next to Run and call it 'Instant Run' and give it an awesome lighting bolt icon!

First someone: what will it do differently?

Second someone: nothing 😎

🤭🤭🤭

You think you are making a choice but you already choose. You are just trying to know why you chose it.

— Cursee

Yesterday was a bad day when, it took 4 hours to build an app. Meanwhile while building, all others app are not responding.

Laptop spec: 4GB ram, Core i5 750HDD

@Yusadolat I remember going to a lecture that was an intro to Android development. The lecturer basically said that 16 gigs might work, but you better have 32. This was two years ago.

Can you imagine, 32GB. I will try and upgrade it. Thanks for the insight

Hmmm UWP apps compile using .Net native (takes c# spits out native machine code) and to build the x86, x64, and the ARM packages it takes about 15 minutes on my 12GB core i5 machine. Oh and i only have to this before sending the package to the store. For the usual debugging i don't have to compile it natively...

Somehow developers prefer android 😫

@MrCSharp One doesn't really have the word about preferences. You develop for what the market wants and you know how well Windows 10 has caught on mobile...

@kamen Fully agree with you mate. But also keep in mind that UWP is not just for Mobile. With it you can build desktop, mobile, XBOX, HoloLens, and IoT apps. It is a very good platform and great developer experience and tools. I just find it a bit surprising that soon many devs complain about their experience developing for android and at the same time never try other platforms. If this happened, maybe W10M would've had a chance :(

@MrCSharp I know, I just thought you were trying to make the parallel between different mobile platforms.

Why would you build app on your dev machine?

Well instant run hot swaps the changes, but I think it is limited to only one or two file changes.
So if you are changing single file then instant run actually builds a lot faster than regular run.

@makarand instant run basically creates a patch and applies it to only the changed code, but in reality it never feels faster.

Instant Run is faster, but I never tried using it. I am from the Eclipse+ADT generation where we had to run clean and rebuild command everytime there's some weird bug. You can see the answers of most of the old Android questions on Stackoverflow was just Clean and rebuild.

So I learned to not trust the build system completely. I have 0 trust on hot swaps. I used to have them in few of the old OpenGL based games I made on x86 using Marmalade and those hot swaps were really buggy.

And if you don't know Android Studio needs at least 8 GB RAM with an SSD. I am using it on my MacBook air and it still hangs if I have 50+ tabs on chrome opened in background.

@kamen u can increase virtual ram or swap to build on lower ram pc

@ryanhoffman
Second someone:"And also we add the invisible feature, that if you don't at least perform an normal run with gradle scripts and all that, None of your changes will be applied to the app!!!!"
First guy:"GREAT!"