From my understanding it's mostly about build times and maybe a bit of better code minification snuck in. The current gradle build process with the android grad

From my understanding it's mostly about build times and maybe a bit of better code minification snuck in. The current gradle build process with the android gradle plugin is really slow for larger procjets. My last project took 15 seconds to compile hot and over a 1 minute to compile from cold start. This adds up when you need to make a build and see it on a device to make sure it looks right. They are also making improvements to a UI editor/preview but that never replaces actually testing on a device. Speed to build is a big feature here.