You can enable it by adding this to your gradle.properties script =true It allows Gradle to store information about which tasks’ inputs and outputs were changed between builds, so it can quickly figure out which ones to re-execute. If you’re already using Gradle version 7, skip this section because it’s enabled by default, but if you’re stuck on version 6.7 (AGP versions 7 and 4.2), then you should manually enable file-system watching. We were using AGP 4.2, and by updating to AGP 7, we were able to take advantage of the performance improvmenets promised in Gradle 7, which takes us to my next point. Use the latest versions of the tools and plugins you use in your project.

Different things work for different projects. It’s down to about 2 minutes now, so I’ll share some of the things I learned along the way, but please don’t apply these changes blindly to your project and instead use the Gradle profiler to ensure that they work for your existing setup.

You can imagine how wildly unproductive that made me feel, so I went on a journey to speed it up. When I joined my current company a few months ago, building our Android app took an average of 14 minutes on my machine.

Android studio gradle location