I am working on an Android app that has several different product flavors. Each flavor has a unique set of libraries it needs, but I don't have this information until runtime. Right now, all the features of the app are packaged into each product flavor, even if that flavor only uses a handful of them. What I would like to do is, at startup, determine which features can be accessed, and download the appropriate libraries it will need. Is there a way that I can determine at first startup which Fragments can be accessed by the Activity?
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I want to build an app with different configurations. Let's say there are two flavors, A and B, which depend on different third-party libraries to perform similar tasks. I want to offer a default configuration on Google Play which comes with a separate launcher for each flavor. Both launcher instances should share local data. However, I also would like to keep the option to build and ship just one of the flavors without including the third-party libraries required for the other one.
From what information I've found, I could either use a single flavor with two launchers, losing the option to build just for one of the third-party libraries. Or I could use two flavors, but would have to separate the whole project into multiple apps with separate ids which would have to be updated separately, presumably require more storage and require some kind of workaround for sharing local data.
So, is there a way to build multiple flavors into a single app bundle with separate launchers or a similar solution for these requirements?
is there a way to build multiple flavors into a single app bundle with separate launchers
I am assuming that by "flavors" you mean product flavors in the Android build system. If that is correct, then... no, sorry, there is no simple option for this.
or a similar solution for these requirements?
It might be possible to pull off something like this with a careful subdivision of your app into modules. You would have three app modules — I will call them a, b, and ab after your naming system. Those would be as small as possible. Most of your code would reside in a series of library modules. In particular, code tied to each third-party SDK would be isolated in its own library (or libraries). a would link to library modules tied to one SDK (plus common modules), b would link to library modules tied to the other SDK (plus common modules), and ab would link to (probably) everything.
I'm searching for differences between modules and flavor.
I've read those posts:
Android difference between module vs flavor
When to use android flavours vs separate projects
But it's still a bit blur about the differences and how to choose between one and another.
So far the only differences, I manage to get out of it is:
Different structure
Modules can do everything that a Flavor does.
My first question is, what's the difference and what's so good about flavor that you don't use modules ?
Also, is flavor adapted for 2 applications where Application-1 and Application-2 share same code base (i.e. API, models, utils, service), but deviate from each other in terms of features and UI?
When to use modules:
When your project can be separated into smaller independent parts.
I've don'e this to my project, and my compile time went from 50+ seconds per iteration to less than 10 per iteration.
Because when I change code in 1 module, the others dont change and that's why the compile time is faster.
When to use flavours:
When you want to publish apps to different stores, and they need to have different applicationId
for example you want to publish to google play, and amazon store, and some other store that no one has heard of.
When you want to have part of your app available under certain build time conditions
When you want to whitelabel your app - basically it has the same logic but different UI, so in practice it is a completely different app, only... it's not.
I'm developing and app which will (during the development and testing process but NOT in the final version) require slightly different functionality in different .apk release files.
There are few issues in this particular case:
different "testing" APK versions shouldn't contain ANY of the code and resources (so no shared strings and images) from other APK versions (for security/reverse engineering reasons cause different people will have access to different APK versions)
at the end of the development process the app will contain all/most of the features from the "testing" builds.
the app uses multiple modules (developed by different teams)
there might be a few (between 3 and 10) of those versions, all developed concurrently by multiple developers in the same project on the same repository.
The goal is to make it as easy to maintain (including UI/integration tests and CI) as possible. Is there any way to achieve this? We did some experiments with different build variants and flavours + no-op modules/methods but it seems a little bit complex. Any alternative suggestion will be welcomed.
Your question is indeed too broad, I think there is no general solution to your problem because it's too complex, and without knowing the details of the project it's even more difficult to tackle. Actually, your problem sounds much more like an organizational one rather than a programming-related one, the only "solution" I see is to address specific issues.
1. No VCS, no party
there might be a few (between 3 and 10) of those versions, all
developed concurrently by multiple developers in the same project on
the same repository.
I would start by defining your VCS flow, because without a version control system I'm afraid you and your team(s) aren't going anywhere. If you were to use git (don't know how this would be done with other VCS), you would have a few options:
Each feature (team) has its own, long-living, feature-branch. The common code shared by all teams is kept on a develop-branch, on which each feature-branch periodically rebase. You would need to setup your CI to build test apks and run automated tests for each branch. At the end of the development process everything gets merged into master (or develop, or whatever). The advantage would be that each feature (team) would work on a sealed portion of the project and will be able to handle test releases and automated tests autonomously. The disadvantage would be that the common part of the codebase (develop-branch) needs to be handled very carefully, otherwise you might get conflicts-hell.
The whole project is developed on a common develop-branch. Each feature is developed with small increments, each member of each team branches from develop-branch and merges every iteration back on develop-branch. The advantage would be: different features can potentially depend on each other, conflicts are less likely to occur, CI has simpler configuration. Disadvantage: teams are less independent, releasing different apks requires a strategy.
2. Define dependencies
In order to choose a proper strategy, it is crucial to define clearly the dependencies between the features. Would it be possible to have truly parallel development of each feature?
This depends entirely on the specification of the project. For instance, if you were to develop an e-commerce app, you might end up having feature domains like user account, products catalog, orders processing... If all of these features depend on common local storage layer, how are you going to develop them truly in parallel?
Once you've defined the dependencies, you will be able to decide in what degree the features can be developed in parallel. Do different teams need to agree on common interfaces? Could a feature be completed even if other teams are still at 0?
3. Build variants are your friend
different "testing" APK versions shouldn't contain ANY of the code and
resources (so no shared strings and images) from other APK versions
(for security/reverse engineering reasons cause different people will
have access to different APK versions)
Flavors are meant to do exactly what you're looking for, that is, build different apks from the same project but using different subsets of code and/or resources.
Keep in mind that you can have flavors in multiple dimensions (and build types). For instance, you could have one flavor dimension called "network", with 2 flavors "mockedNetwork" and "actualNetwork". Then you could have another dimension "feature", with "featureA", "featureB", "featureC". You could then easily build and release 6 types (well 12 if you have also debug and release build types) of apks, one for each combination (mockedNetworkFeatureA, actualNetworkFeatureA, mockedNetworkFeatureB etc.).
With flavors you could easily replace chunks of the app that you don't want your tester to have. For instance, you could have a strings.xml file with only lorem ipsum strings and then keep actual texts strings only for internal use.
What I would do is to use git. The master branch is kept clean for production and each team can have one or multiple branches to work on. They can change the package name in their branch so your APKs will all be different. The only problem with this approach will be the merges into the master branch that might cause conflicts. But this could be a solution to your problem.
I'm currently developing an app which is actually available in Google Play and it has two different versions. One of them has full functionality and runs without any advertisement.The other one instead cannot access every feature and shows ads.
I'm managing these two versions with two different android studio projects and
two different repositories.
I just wanted to know how could I manage better the development of these two versions of the same app. I've read something about flavors in gradle but I don't really know if they could be useful in my case. Other thing I've thought about is that maybe I could just have one repository with a branch where I just have different files for those features which are not the same, remaining always the common files update.
So, which is the better way to deal with this situation? Any other ideas are welcomed.
Thanks in advance for your help
Gradle flavors are what you are looking for. With them you can have all the common code and resources in one place, so there is no need to copy it, and the code and resources that differ in another place. Flavors also provide a convenient way to build several versions of the app.
From what you describes it seems that both your versions of the app are almost the same, so in your case you simply need a boolean to differentiate between them:
if (FULL_VERSION) {
unlockFeature();
}
else {
showAd();
}
You could implement this by creating a class for each flavor, one with the constant set to true and one with constant set to false. A more object oriented design would be to have a class that unlocks the feature for one flavor and another that shows an ad for the other.
Note that flavors produce an APKs with different package names, so you can't have an in-app purchase that would unlock features and remove ads.
I have an application which has a free and a paid flavor. I am starting to add additional features to the paid version. To this point, the flavor differences have been handled either by a boolean in the build gradle or a couple of different layouts in the flavor folders. The layout differences up to this point existed because advertising code was embedded in the layout xml. Going forward some of these will have unique items/content but most of the new stuff will have its own layouts.
Almost all the additional features will reside in specific classes for the paid flavor. However, I'm a bit perplexed with what to do with a few of my activity classes which begin with a menu of user choices and are for all intents common to both flavors. It seems there is no way, for instance, to use a click listener which references an R.id in one flavor of the layout but not the other. Thus the activity itself must be maintained in two versions.
It seems excessive and cumbersome to maintain two flavors of activity code just to deal with a few non-common lines. I was thinking the best way to handle my very specific instance is to make sure both layouts have all the R.id's necessary for the activity and to hide the unused ones. Not ideal, but less cumbersome than maintaining two versions of the activity.
Is there a better way to handle this in general?