How long should one have to wait for “Starting a Gradle daemon” to complete? I’m pleased to know that “(subsequent builds will be faster)”, but I’m approaching an hour and wondering if Gradle is ever going to start… (Not sure what Gradle is, or if it’s possible to help it along; first time using DAB.)
First thing, my sense of time is off… The build completed (yay!) in “33 min 56 sec”. Second thing, I’ll try to figure out how to mark this ‘solved’. 
That does sound very long for a build. I have 1min 34 sec for a built (not the first build).
Questions:
What are your computer specs?
What is in the dictionary? How many entries? Is there lots of pictures and audio?
What size is the app?
Computer specs: Lenovo X260, SSD, 16 GB RAM
Dictionary content: words; about 5,500 of 'em; no pictures or audio
App size: 9 MB
Subsequent builds have all been under 1 minute – most in the 40 second range. But the first one had me wondering!
The only thing could be that there was some background updating of Gradle or the SDK combined with slow internet.
And Gradle is the compiler, pulling all the pieces of your data, JDK, SDK etc. together. A “daemon” (unfortunate name from way-long ago early UNIX) is an independent process running on your computer.