The Brownfield Gradle Plugin received a significant architectural overhaul that delivers a 22% improvement in clean Android release builds. The core change moves from eager artifact resolution during Gradle's configuration phase to a task-driven pipeline using lightweight dependency metadata (UnresolvedArtifactInfo). Key improvements include a dedicated ExplodeAarTask, decomposed variant processors with single responsibilities, improved Expo dependency handling, and migration away from the deprecated AGP v8 LibraryVariant API toward AGP v9 compatibility. Benchmarks using Gradle Profiler with strict clean-build conditions (no build cache, no configuration cache) confirmed savings of roughly 22 seconds per clean release build.
Table of contents
The problem: configuration-time work was costing usThe fix: move from eager resolution to a task-driven pipelineExample: AAR exploding became a real taskExample: variant processing is now composed, not monolithicExample: Expo dependencies are handled more deliberatelyLaying The Foundation: Adopting AGP v9Measuring the improvementFinal thoughts10 Impressions