Square's Client Foundations team shares concrete improvements made to developer productivity across Android, iOS, and backend development workflows.
•Development apps framework reduced local Android build times from 96 seconds to 18 seconds by enabling feature builds in isolation
•Remote Development Environments using EC2 instances (32 cores, 96GB RAM) doubled local build speeds; configuration caching made builds up to 50% faster, saving 5,000+ developer hours annually
•A shard skipping algorithm improved Android CI job speeds by up to 90%; emulator/simulator optimizations cut CI durations by 23%
•Migrating iOS and Java monorepos to Bazel reduced build times by 80% and 30% respectively; SKI Playpen enabled local changes to reach staging within seconds
•IDE sync times improved by 60% (saving ~1,600 dev hours/year) through modularization fixes, IntelliJ Kotlin plugin improvements, and systematic benchmarking of AGP, Kotlin, Android Studio, and Gradle
