android build.gradle what is group used for?

Question

check build.gradle and there is a variable from project itself called "group". In the code i inherited its set to the application id but what is group used for ?

the gradle documentation it states:

void setGroup(Object group) Sets the group of this project.

UPDATE: From what i can tell from here it looks like groups are for grouping tasks together.

Answer 1

The group is effectively a namespace for identifying the artifact or artifacts produced by a build. As an example, when you have a dependency like this:

dependencies {
    compile 'org.hibernate:hibernate-core:3.6.7.Final'
}

The org.hibernate is the group (or groupId in Maven parlance). So if your build produces a JAR file that is published to a repository, it is published under the group you specify in the build file:

group = "org.example"

I don't know if the group makes much sense outside of publishing artifacts. I only ever use it for JAR libraries.