Why Android build takes so long?

[burekas7]

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Which mobile framework are you using?

Flutter (Dart)

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Why are my Android build times taking so long?
It’s taking over 6–7 minutes on average.

It wasn’t like this in the past.

Here are some recent examples:
https://codemagic.io/app/636d13c539a617000f89bf6e/build/694ae8d4ef6062b182ee79f2
https://codemagic.io/app/636d13c539a617000f89bf6e/build/694a77ab3176a3c53d9030f9

[dam-ease]

Hello @burekas7,
I checked and see that your aab size is about 70MB, and also considering the installations that took place, the 7 mins build time seems normal.

Codemagic already has some preinstalled android sdk, ndk, java and other versions but if your project needs a different versions then it will automatically be fetched and installed during the build. If you expand the logs for the Building Android step, you’ll see entries like this:

Preparing "Install NDK (Side by side) 27.0.12077973 v.27.0.12077973".
"Install NDK (Side by side) 27.0.12077973 v.27.0.12077973" ready.
Installing NDK (Side by side) 27.0.12077973 in /usr/local/share/android-sdk/ndk/27.0.12077973
"Install NDK (Side by side) 27.0.12077973 v.27.0.12077973" complete.
"Install NDK (Side by side) 27.0.12077973 v.27.0.12077973" finished.

You can see the installation process happening during the build, these are Android SDKs and NDKs that your project requires. And this surely adds some build times.

Since the logs show the exact installation paths, you can try caching them as well:

/usr/local/share/android-sdk/ndk/27.0.12077973
/usr/local/share/android-sdk/build-tools/35.0.0

So try adding this these to your cache paths:

cache:
  cache_paths:
    - $ANDROID_SDK_ROOT/ndk/27.0.12077973
    - $ANDROID_SDK_ROOT/build-tools/35.0.0

You can read more about caching here too - https://docs.codemagic.io/knowledge-codemagic/caching/