I'm just suggesting that people are assigning blame in the wrong place. It's typically not Gradle's fault, but just that Gradle is being asked to perform a bunc

I'm just suggesting that people are assigning blame in the wrong place. It's typically not Gradle's fault, but just that Gradle is being asked to perform a bunch of expensive (and often unnecessary) operations, like - The build might have dependencies with dynamic versions or changing modules (aka snapshots), meaning that Gradle periodically has to download the latest version. - The project might have proguard enabled for dev builds, which isn't really necessary. (As long as you smoke test release builds, which is a good idea anyway.) - The project might have dex merging enabled for dev builds, which isn't necessary unless you need to test something on a pre-ART device. - Engineers might be passing --clean or --refresh-dependencies, out of habit, when they're not needed. You could criticize Android's architecture for not being conducive to incremental builds, or you could criticize Android Studio for generating build files with some expensive functionality enabled. But none of this has much to do with Gradle.