What role does Gradle play in Android Development?

Gradle is the major participant in Android Development, whereby, through it, the building and preparation of the application are carried out by compilation of the code and various dependencies involved in the process. It further enables the developer to define a custom Build configuration, such as Debug and Release builds, thereby making handling Third-party libraries efficient. It is, beyond any doubt, indispensable for handling complex Build issues, since it is flexible; due to its strong Scripting capability, this does imply that an application will be consistently and reliably built on disparate environments.