I agree that moving to AS+Gradle was a net improvement (even though Gradle is not always so quick) because it let us exactly reproduce the individual developer's build on the CI server, as you say.
OTOH, I wonder how many devs really grok the Android gradle plugin and feel comfortable just writing tasks themselves without carefully copying/pasting/modifying some magical incantation from somewhere.
I feel like the verdict on Instant Run is still out though. We need to get used to the complexity of IR's choices to restart the Activity or stop the entire app and reinstall the apk etc and gain solid confidence that we can just trust IR to truly reproduce our code changes in its special, optimized way.
> how many devs really grok the Android gradle plugin and feel comfortable just writing tasks themselves without carefully copying/pasting
That plugin uses Apache Groovy for its syntax, though in reality only a tiny non-Turing Complete portion of Groovy's syntax is used in virtually every build script out there. The main difficulty with Gradle is really the complex API it exposes to Groovy, e.g. not knowing whether to use an = like in
OTOH, I wonder how many devs really grok the Android gradle plugin and feel comfortable just writing tasks themselves without carefully copying/pasting/modifying some magical incantation from somewhere.
I feel like the verdict on Instant Run is still out though. We need to get used to the complexity of IR's choices to restart the Activity or stop the entire app and reinstall the apk etc and gain solid confidence that we can just trust IR to truly reproduce our code changes in its special, optimized way.