On: 65535 interfaces ought to be enough for anybody

[karmelapple]

Our app's build time ballooned by 2-3X or more when we went to multidex. We've had some luck reducing it, but we'd still like to axe multidex.

I definitely consider a 3X build time increase (not 30 seconds to 90 seconds, but 1 or 2 min to 5-8) to be a significant problem, bordering on nightmare... especially since we just included a few more libraries that put us past the 65k mark.

Is that what other people have seen?

[Benjammer → karmelapple]

How is your dev pipeline set up such that an 8 minute release build becomes such a problem?

[karmelapple → Benjammer]

I guess I'm thinking of builds on my machine taking that long, not even release builds.

[dgfgfdagasdfgfa → karmelapple]

Surely that's just a release build, though...? How would this bottleneck productivity for a team?

[raydev → dgfgfdagasdfgfa]

When you deploy release-like builds to your QA team (as you should), a tripled-build time is a bit problematic if you're trying to iterate quickly.

[Benjammer → raydev]

Who needs to "iterate" so quickly that several minutes added to your build time becomes a huge issue?

[BoorishBears → Benjammer]

Me? I work on embedded android installations that have over a thousand years combined of running with 0 software crashes. Once I get to a certain point in developing an app for our installations I start profiling for the slightest memory leaks by watching changes in memory usage profiles for different user flows.

And I can only do that with release builds if I want useful numbers. I've had us split up apps over build times because of Multidex (for example, most of our AWS centric code lives in a separate app that exposes specific functions via an AIDL interface because the SDK was bringing in too many methods)