If you develop mobile apps with Delphi, you know it: compiling for Android and iOS is sloooooooooooooow, especially for debug builds. This little tip makes compiling Debug builds much faster…

You may know this tip already, but if you don’t, you’ll be glad you do now.

You would expect that Release builds take longer to compile than Debug builds, since it has to perform a bunch of code optimization phases. But the opposite is true. Building our grijjy app for iOS or Android in Debug mode takes about a whopping 7.5 minutes. Building the same app in Release mode takes less than 1 minute. (Of course, this still pales in comparison to building the same app for Windows, which takes less than 3 seconds).

The majority of time compiling a Debug build is spent creating debug information, so this is where gains can be made. Making just one change to your project options can make your Debug builds much faster. Almost as fast as a Release builds.

Set the “Debug information” option to “Limited Debug information”

You can find this under “Project | Options… | Delphi Compiler | Compiling | Debugging”:

Changing this option only slightly limits the (already limited) debugging capabilities on mobile devices.