Evolution of the Android Open Source Project, AOSP: Code Size and Relative Build Time

CloudBees is sponsoring the 2013 Android Builders Summit , where we will launch some very exciting new solutions and offerings for Android device and chipset makers looking to accelerate their Android Software Delivery.
One of the most exciting news that we will announce at the event is how the engineers at CloudBees have been able to optimize CloudBees Accelerator for the Android platform build and are able to show significant speedup compared to any of the alternatives – more on that in future news and blog posts.
This post is a slight side-step from that discussion, but I hope still interesting. In the below graphs and table, you will see the evolution of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), in terms of the relative size of the code base and build times:

If compared so other significant open source project, you can see in the graph above there has been significant growth in the Android code base in the past 4 years, which should not come as a surprise given the enormous innovation that’s gone in the platform in recent years.

In the table and graph above, we have listed relative build times for some of the most prominent Android versions. Except for a massive leap in between Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread and Android 4.0.1 Ice Cream Sandwich you see that the relative build times are fairly consistent with the growth of the code base.
Which brings up a few interesting questions (for which we yet don’t know the answer to):
• Will the code base of Android continue to show such an aggressive growth in the next major release (v5.0 Key Lime Pie ) and beyond?
• How will the relative build time evolve? Will it continue to scale faster than the code size?