While it’s true that I think buck is awesome, the Android tools team has thrown their weight behind Gradle, which gives Gradle a serious advantage in the traction department.

This has resulted in a plethora of plugins being developed which do some awesome things. And while I prefer buck for actual builds, I am taking advantage of some of the work being done on gradle plugins to take care of some tasks associated with building Android projects.

Jake Wharton has released several that are interesting. Most recently he released the SDK Manager Plugin, which is awesome for building on CI machines where you don’t want to have to be bothered with all the details of finding and installing the right SDK version.

Mr. Wharton has also released a plugin for using espresso with gradle called double espresso. This plugin makes it much easier to get espresso tests running using gradle.

There is also the highly useful android quality plugin which gives findbugs pmd copy paste detector and checkstyle targets that can be used to help track software quality.

If you are using Robolectric for tests then consider using their Android Test Plugin to get tests running quickly in the IDE, which is a fork of an earlier plugin, again from Mr. Wharton. Have I mentioned he is awesome? Having never met him, I can honesty say he is. ;~)

Another really useful plugin for working with Android on CI servers is the Android Command Plugin, which makes it easier to install particular builds on particular devices and run commands against them.

What plugins are you using to make your builds suck less?