January 2025

Welcome to the January 2025 Gradle Build Tool newsletter! We’re kicking off the New Year with exciting updates: explore the Gradle 8.12 release and the latest blogs, videos, and releases, as well as an update on our involvement in the Kotlin Foundation. Plus, we’re gearing up for Google Summer of Code 2025 and are looking for mentors and project ideas—join us

From the Community

New Posts

New Videos

New Releases

From the Gradle Team

Gradle Build Tool 8.12 and 8.12.1

Gradle Build Tool 8.12 and 8.12.1

On December 19, we released Gradle Build Tool 8.12. This release improves error and warning reporting by summarizing duplicate entries in the Problems HTML Report. Artifact Transform ambiguity reports now include more comprehensive, actionable information. The release also introduces platform enhancements, including file-system watching support on the Alpine Linux distribution and support for building and testing Swift 6 applications.

On January 23, we also shipped the patch release with several bug fixes, including build failures on MacOS and Linux in certain scenarios. We recommend users upgrade to 8.12.1 instead of 8.12.

To learn more, see the 8.12.1 changelog.

Develocity Plugin for Gradle v. 3.19

Develocity Plugin for Gradle v. 3.19

In December 2024, the Develocity Team released version 3.19 of the Develocity Plugin for Gradle as a part of the Develocity 2024.3 release. It introduces expanded support for Build Scan and system resource usage reporting. Additionally, it includes Edge discovery based on a Develocity user’s location preference in Build Cache. For users of Gradle’s Isolated Projects feature, a reworked performance configuration page is now available. We also released Develocity 2024.3.2, which squashed a couple of bugs.

Upgrade Develocity Plugin for Gradle to version 3.19 to take advantage of these new features in your Develocity setup or directly on scans.gradle.com. See the v3.19 Release Notes for more information.

10 Years of Android Studio

10 Years of Android Studio

Last month, Android Studio reached a big milestone: it’s been 10 years since the Android Studio 1.0 release 🎉 The IDE provides millions of developers with an integrated environment to develop, test, debug, and package Android apps. Gradle Build Tool is an instrumental part of this ecosystem.

Hans Dockter, creator of Gradle Build Tool and CEO/Founder of Gradle Inc., commented on this exciting milestone “Android Studio’s 10th anniversary marks a decade of incredible progress for Android developers. We are proud that Gradle Build Tool has continued to be a foundational part of the Android toolchain, enabling millions of Android developers to build their apps faster, more elegantly, and at scale.”

Learn more in this blog post by Google, and happy anniversary to Android Studio!

Update on Kotlin Foundation Participation

Update on Kotlin Foundation Participation

At Gradle, we continue to invest in Kotlin build tooling and developer productivity to ensure the best possible developer experience with Gradle for Kotlin, KMP, and Android projects. Kotlin has been the default language for new Gradle builds since 2023 (announcement here). As a part of our continued support for the Kotlin ecosystem, Gradle is a silver member of the Kotlin Foundation with members in multiple committees. In December, Gradle also joined the Kotlin Ecosystem Committee.

Additionally, as part of our open-source support program, Gradle provides a Develocity instance for the Kotlin project. Kotlin, along with the Kotlin compiler, Ktor, and other core projects, rely on Gradle Build Tool and Develocity for speeding up builds and tests, and gaining insights into failures, flaky tests, and performance trends. We’re proud to support these projects and invest in their ongoing success!

Learn more about Gradle and Kotlin here. If you’re on the Kotlin Slack, share feedback with us in the #gradle channel!

Gradle in Google Summer of Code 2025

Gradle in Google Summer of Code 2025

We’re excited to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 and are currently seeking mentors and project ideas.

As in previous years, we’ll collaborate with the Kotlin Foundation rather than hosting a separate mentoring organization. Our goal is to support 1–2 projects that improve the Gradle developer experience, including plugins, developer tools, and IDE integrations. Each project will have a group of mentors dedicating a few hours per week to guide full-time or part-time contributors over a 3-month period.

If you’re interested in participating, join the #gsoc channel on the Gradle Community Slack. You can explore examples of 2024 project ideas here.

Upcoming Events

Meet the Gradle team and fellow community members at these upcoming events! We’d love to connect with you and discuss anything related to Gradle Build Tool, Develocity, or Developer Productivity Engineering.

Virtual Gradle User Group is Live

As we discovered recently, many Gradle Build Tool users do not use LinkedIn and cannot receive notifications about upcoming community events from our official account there. So, we decided to start our first Virtual Gradle User Group on Meetup-dot-com.

If you’re interested in joining us for Gradle community meetings, webinars, and show-and-tell sessions, consider joining the group here. The first events will be announced soon!

Spread the Word

The Call for Proposals for the February edition is already open! Any contributions are appreciated.

If you have some news you’d like us to share in the next issue, let us know using the #community-news channel on the Gradle Community Slack or by mentioning @Gradle on Twitter/X.

Until next time!
— The Gradle Team

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