For some time, I have been advocating for building Fennec with a full-featured Android build system. Here’s why.

2014 was an exciting year of improvements to the Firefox for Android front-end engineering build chain. 2015 is going to be even better. We’re going to improve the Firefox for Android development experience in three main ways: making your first build easier; making your next builds faster; and letting you use the Android tools you know and love.

Developing Fennec with Eclipse has been working well for quite some time now, but Eclipse is officially no longer supported by Google and the new standard is to build with Gradle and to edit in Android Studio or IntelliJ. I recently landed Bug 1041395 and friends, which makes it easy to build Fennec with Gradle. Here is a companion demonstration screencast.