Gradle was not a Google invention. Dagger was invented by Square. Google invented Guice (Bob Lee now at Square) which was way better than Spring and J2EE. Guava

Gradle was not a Google invention. Dagger was invented by Square. Google invented Guice (Bob Lee now at Square) which was way better than Spring and J2EE. Guava is far better designed than Apache Commons. Dagger2 was invented by Google for good reason because it works purely as an annotation processor without runtime bytecode classloader magic. That means it is easier to debug, faster to startup on mobile, and can be crosscompiled with j2objc and GWT/j2cl. Much of the time in-house stuff is created to deal with scalability or maintain ability problems.