Different Android Builds For Different Environments

Question

I'd like to be able to build and install multiple versions of my app (concurrently), targeting different environments such as Development, Staging and of course Production.

The package name in the AndroidManifest.xml seems to be the major hurdle here, as it is what uniquely identifies the app. I thought it would be possible to simply switch between com.mydomain.prod, com.mydomain.staging and com.mydomain.dev or some sort of similar convention but so far I've had no luck coming up with a package structure that works for this approach.

What strategy can I employ to do this with as little pain as possible?

Answer 1

With Gradle you can specify different "flavors" of your application. This is done in your build.gradle:

android {
    // …

    defaultConfig {
        // …
    }

    productFlavors {
        prod
            applicationId "com.mydomain.prod"
        }

        staging {
            applicationId "com.mydomain.staging"
        }

        dev {
            applicationId "com.mydomain.dev"
            versionCode 2
        }
    }
}

Each flavor properties are inherited from defaultConfig.

Now, in the src directory of your app, you can create directories with flavor-specific code/resources in it:

app/
|-- src/
    |-- main/
    |-- prod/
    |-- staging/
    |-- dev/

These links might be useful:

• How to build customized Android application using Gradle
• Gradle Build Variants for your android project