Question

I am wondering, if there is any way, how to set skip packaging and dexing in IntelliJ IDEA like in Eclipse and ADT. There is Additional VM Options field in Android DX Compiler section in IntelliJ Preferences, maybe this could be a way, how to set it. I would also appreciate another tips, how to speed up IntelliJ Android project build.

Answer 1

In Eclipse preferences, the complete name of skip packaging and dexing you are referring is Skip packaging and dexing until export or launch. (Speeds up automatic builds on file save), which is a feature added since ADT 12 in orde to address Eclipse incremental compilation problem (which slow down development on Eclipse), check out the Revisions 12.0.0 (July 2011) and this link for more details, Note that packaging and dexing are fundamental step when you are debugging/running project regardless of which IDE (or non) you use.

As CrazyCoder mentioned in his comments, IntelliJ doesn’t support Eclipse-like incremental compilation and Problems pane by default, in another word, it doesn’t auto compile your project when file changed. So this is really not an issue nor feature in IntelliJ.

Your build process bottleneck probably comes from other place. AFAIK in a medium-sized project, the most time build process spend on is compiling resources (AAPT command, check out build process diagram). Some smart people from xdadevelopers found the bottleneck and create a fix version of AAPT:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1907281

I use it myself and I would say the speed boost is feelable in Eclipse, note that it only boost the AAPT step, not packaging ad dexing. If you use InteliJ, it probably doesn’t help much as it needn’t compile the project quite often.