Introduction

Welcome to the July 2026 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! This month, the company behind Gradle has a new name (the build tool doesn’t), tips and tricks running Gradle on ephemeral CI, and the Gradle talks from KotlinConf land on YouTube.

From the Community

HIDDEN FINGERPRINTING

Why did a trivial AndroidX task that just prints a git SHA take over a second per build? Aurimas Liutikas tracks the cost to a place build scans don’t show: Gradle’s input fingerprinting. Two small changes later, the task is 24x faster.

👉 Read the post

A TALE OF THE GRADLE DSLS

Gradle’s Paul Merlin traces the evolution of Gradle’s DSLs — from Groovy to Kotlin to Declarative Gradle — and where each fits today, recorded at KotlinConf 2026.

👉 Watch the video

DECLARATIVE GRADLE FOR KOTLIN PROJECTS

Also from KotlinConf 2026, Marcin Mycek gives a first look at the Kotlin ecosystem plugin for Declarative Gradle, which brings declarative configuration to Kotlin projects.

👉 Watch the video

From Gradle

THE COMPANY FORMERLY KNOWN AS GRADLE

For years, “Gradle” has meant two things: the open source build tool and the company behind it. That bug is now fixed: on June 30, the company renamed itself from Gradle Technologies to Develocity and moved to develocity.ai.

For the build tool, nothing changes:

• Gradle Build Tool keeps its name and its home at gradle.org, now branded “Gradle by Develocity”.
• It remains free and open source under Apache 2.0 — no acquisition, no relicensing.
• The same team keeps maintaining it, on the same release cadence.

👉 Read the post

GRADLE ON EPHEMERAL CI

Laura Kassovic and Louis Jacomet published a three-part series on making Gradle fast on throwaway CI agents, with benchmarked numbers for every technique:

• Part 1: Startup - priming the Gradle distribution in your CI image cut startup by ~24%.
• Part 2: Configuration - dependency caching was the biggest single lever at ~28%.
• Part 3: Execution - local and remote Build Cache, transforms and JDK caches, plus a full phase-by-phase results table.

👉 Start with Part 1

EVERY ISSUE GETS AN ANSWER

The stale bot is retired. Every issue and pull request on gradle/gradle now gets a human response within a week, backed by a purpose-built issue-management action that automates metadata checks, feedback loops, and re-triage of comments on closed issues. Louis Jacomet and Vlad Chesnokov explain how the team handles ~110 incoming issues a month — plus the updated contributing guide, including the project’s AI-contribution policy.

👉 Read the post

GRADLE PROFILER 0.25.0

Gradle Profiler 0.25.0 is out! Highlights include a new --single-shot option, IntelliJ IDEA sync benchmarking on the 2025.3 platform, and distribution via SDKMAN (sdk install gradleprofiler). It’s the same tool the Gradle team used for the Isolated Projects benchmarks above.

👉 See the release notes

From Develocity

DEVELOCITY 2026.2

Develocity 2026.2 shipped alongside the rebrand, with a strong agentic-AI theme:

• Build Caching Optimizer: an AI skill that lets agents autonomously diagnose and fix build cache misses using Build Scan® data, working hand in hand with the new Build Scan comparison tool in the Develocity MCP Server.
• Repository Stability dashboard: track upstream repository failures and degradation across all builds, queryable in plain language via the Analytics MCP Server.
• Expanded Artifact Cache coverage: now caches SonarQube quality-gate tooling and Maven snapshot dependencies.
• Setup Cache improvements: buildSrc and included builds are now cached, cutting configuration time on ephemeral CI agents.

👉 See the release notes

Upcoming events

Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you to discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE), or AI’s evolving impact on software development and delivery.

• September 1–3 — DroidKaigi 2026 — Tokyo, Japan. Japan’s flagship Android developer conference, deeply relevant to anyone building with Gradle and AGP.
• September 2–3 — Javazone 2026 — Lillestrøm, Norway. Come visit the Gradle team at the biggest community-driven Java conference, organized by JavaBin and the Norwegian Java User Group.
• September 9–11 — KCDC 2026 — Kansas City, USA. Large polyglot conference with strong Java, Kotlin, and DevOps tracks.
• October 5–9 — Devoxx Belgium 2026 — Antwerp, Belgium. The largest JVM developer conference in Europe; the Gradle team will be there.

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The Call for Proposals for the August edition is now open!