The Java Development Kit (JDK) version 17 has been preinstalled on all build stacks to help improve Android build times, with benchmarking showing speed improvements ranging from 4-20% compared to JDK 11. The key findings include that switching to the Parallel garbage collector results in faster build times for both JDK 11 and JDK 17, while upgrading to JDK 17 alone also shows significant speedups. Additionally, some plugins and tools may need updates to work with JDK 17, and users should upgrade Gradle to version 7.3 and Kotlin to version 1.5.30 to take full advantage of the improvements.