Gradle build profiling and auto-tuning for Android teams

The moment that drives someone here is when a developer changes two lines of code, hits build, and waits four minutes — again — with no idea whether it's the annotation processor, the Gradle daemon heap size, the number of parallel workers, or something else entirely. They've already Googled 'speed up Gradle build' three times this month and applied contradictory advice from Stack Overflow.

The gap persists because Google has no incentive to solve this aggressively. Android Studio is free, adopted for ecosystem lock-in, and the team's priority is feature parity and new API support — not shaving two minutes off the build of a mid-sized app. Gradle itself is a general-purpose tool that doesn't know it's running inside Android Studio on a MacBook with 16GB RAM and a project using 47 modules.

What's missing isn't a profiler — build scans exist — but those outputs are walls of raw data that require an expert to interpret. Developers complain specifically about 'guesswork' with daemon settings and not knowing which knobs to turn. Nobody is translating raw build scan data into ranked, actionable config changes tied to that team's specific project structure, machine specs, and CI environment.

This is a business because build slowness is a recurring daily tax. A team of eight Android developers each losing 45 minutes per day to builds is roughly 30 developer-hours per week. That compounds every sprint. The need recurs every time the project grows, CI machines change, or a new developer joins with a different machine spec. No one-time Stack Overflow answer fixes it permanently.

What to build

A service that ingests Gradle build scan data from CI and local machines, identifies the top bottlenecks by category (configuration phase, task execution, annotation processing, dependency resolution), and generates a prioritized gradle.properties and settings.gradle diff the team can apply immediately — with projected time savings per change.

Where to start

Start with teams already using Gradle Build Scan (Develocity free tier) who have the data but no interpretation layer — they've already opted into data collection, so the integration is a read-only API connection rather than a new instrumentation ask.

The hard part

Getting teams to instrument their CI pipeline and share build scan data with a third party requires buy-in from both the developer and whoever controls the CI config — often different people — and the perceived security risk of exporting build metadata is a real objection to close before any value is demonstrated.

How it makes money

Monthly subscription per workspace, priced per number of developers on the Android team, with a free tier capped at one project and 30 days of history.