Build Analyzer in Android

Many new features were introduced with the introduction of Android Studio 4.0. Motion Editor, Improved Layout Inspector, Layout Validation, Build Analyzer, and others are just a handful of them. In this article, we’ll learn about Build Analyzer and how to use it.

What exactly is a Build Analyzer?

When developing an app, we’ve seen it take up to 20 minutes (Gradle issues:P), but it may also happen extremely rapidly. So, to figure out why everything is taking so long, Android Studio 4.0 introduced Build Analyzer, a tool that allows you to assess the performance of your project’s build and, based on that, enhance the build time.

Let us now begin to comprehend the Analyzer. How is the report generated by Analyzer?

When we construct the project, the data collected will be contingent on when we build it and may change depending on when we build it.

Geek Tip: If the project is tiny, the analyzer may not generate a different report, but if the project is large enough, a lot of items in the report can differ between two separate build reports.

Let’s imagine we’re building a project that will take some time to complete and will result in the following output. This will generate a full report, which we can access by clicking the Build Analyzer.

Image #1: Build Analyzer Results

We now have a new tab called Build Analyzer, as you can see. At least two alternatives may be available for each report. i.e.

1. Task-based plugins that determine the build’s duration.
2. Tasks that determine how long this build will take.

However, if the project has any warnings, a new Warnings option will appear.

Image #2: No warnings

Let’s take a look at each of them individually now. You can see that we have all of the plugins in the analyzer, and we have the build timing depending on that. Plugins are only added if they helped with at least one task during the project’s development. You can now see the specific tasks accomplished under each plugin by clicking the plugin on the left side. If we select com.android.RBTask, the report appears as follows:

Image #3: Analyzing the report.

On the left, you can see the task that was completed, and on the right, you can see the total task with its execution time. The task of determining the duration of this build. This section contains the tasks in sequential order from multiple plugins, which it orders based on the maximum time required to complete the build. As shown above, the left-hand side panel contains a collection of all the tasks. On the right side, you can see that the tasks are divided based on which one has the greatest impact on the build. Each task is labeled with a different color. Let’s take it one at a time.

• Pink: These tasks are part of the Android Gradle plugin, Java Gradle plugin, or Kotlin Gradle plugin.
• Blue: These are third-party or custom plugin tasks, such as retrofit or any other library.
• Purple: These tasks are not associated with any plugin and are used to dynamically modify our project properties at runtime. These are tasks, for example, that you might define within your build. Gradle files must be executed.
• Light blue: When compared to other tasks highlighted by the analyzer, these tasks have little impact on the build’s duration (in our case other tasks).

Warnings

When we analyze the build, we also get a set of warnings from Android Studio that indicate that it is not running efficiently. When you expand the warning on the left side, you will see a list of warnings. 

Conclusion

As you can see, the build analyzer describes the problem and offers suggestions for how to resolve it. Assume the problem is with a third-party library. Try to generate a report from the appropriate panel and send it to the developer to assist them in fixing it in a later release of the library. This is how the build analyzer can assist us in inspecting the construction of our project.