I work on full-stack product, with iOS/Android SDK element that other people integrate in their apps. Server-side with UNIX boxes: everything works always.<p>Xcode/iOS: we published CocoaPods. It was pain to get to work reliably on laptops/Jenkins b/c of upgrades to Ruby, but if you lock yourself to one Ruby version, and lock the Gemfile, it's mostly OK. At least it's pretty obvious when/why it doesn't work.<p>Gradle: it's such a mess. I don't even know where to start. I don't know Maven, but Gradle error warnings are the worst. 4 lines, tells you nothing, with turned on debugging the output tells you nothing, while e.g.: in reality you don't have the child-repo checked out because you forgot to `git submodule update --init`.<p>Getting Gradle to work on a laptops across the team of 4 was a pain. We had cases where two people with the same AS version and the same gradle version couldn't import the project into AS. Our instructions are - after 'git pull' make sure you do 'git clean -dfx' and re-import the project.<p>Personally 50% of time when I start Android Studio I have some critical exception of some sort, each time from Gradle window. There's this, plus gradle wrapper. I pretty much never worked for me. This is meant to solve problems with always getting you the right Gradle version, but this is sci-fi. I believed it's just me who uses SDKMan to be able to fetch the right gradle which our project depends on, but others around do too. Otherwise it's a pain in the ass -- and `brew` doesn't have the gradle's we need, because they migrated to the very latest one, when in production you'd rather have older version for an extended period of support time.<p>If you, just like us, have a project which has 3+ years of scar tissue and it has to integrate with javanet, picasso, okhttp, volley etc. and you have several people who fetch and integrate your code in their apps--I feel really, really sorry for you.<p>DSL is all right, and maybe Groovy has some unique features, but I never discovered them. This is Java language that isn't Java, or some dialect of Java-like language aimed to make Java 3% better, but to be honest I don't hear people writing Groovy for fun and pleasure. So to me it was a cost of learning basic stuff just to be able to automate simple stuff in Android build system (when we run ./jenkins.sh --local, we want our Android functional tests to hit local dev environment). Of course in XCode it works 100% better and took 20% of time to do, since Apple owns XCode and made it look better: go to project settings, drop in the path to post/pre built scripts to customize your flow, and in a language you already know. Google, who subleases Android Studio from JetBrains, had no choice and made Android ecosystem look like a Frankenstein.