flavors

What are the flavors of an App? And why are they needed in PSLab Android App? While working on the PSLab Android Project, I ran into the need to create different variants of the app with different dependencies. In this blog, I have tried to explain the process of creating various flavors of the app in the easiest way possible.  Android Allows Developers to create different variants of the same app with the same code base but having some functionalities different across the variants. These functionalities may include some special/pro features, some different dependencies, etc. Such variants are called flavors of the App. Most common flavors are Paid and Free version of the app. In the PSLab Android Application, we needed to generate flavors, when we required to use Google Maps in the App. The app is also published on the Fdroid, which doesn’t allow dependencies of Google Maps. Hence 2 flavors of the app have been created,  Play Store Flavor (With Google Maps)F-Droid Flavor (With Open Street Maps) Declaring Flavors in the build.gradle File In order to create flavors of the app, first, we need to declare flavors in the Gradle file. In PSLab Android app we are creating 2 flavors, which are declared in the build.gradle file as under flavorDimensions 'default' productFlavors { fdroid { dimension = 'default' } playstore { dimension = 'default' } } flavorDimensions is used to package flavors if there are many flavors for an App. Since we have only two flavors fdroid and playstore, hence we are using single dimension default for both the flavors. Once this has been added to the build.gradle file we need to sync the gradle.  After the Sync is complete, if we open the Build Variants tab from the left corner of the Android Studio, it would look something like this:  (Figure 1: Build Variant Window of Android Studio) As can be seen in the screenshot above, once the gradle is successfully synced, Android Studio automatically creates debug and release build variants for each flavor and we can easily toggle between variants and build/ run / make apk for each variant. Congratulations! We have successfully finished the first step towards creating flavors of an app. Directory Structure after creating Flavors Apart from creating the build variants of different flavors, Android studio also creates src/<flavor name> folders for us. Now if we want to add new activities and classes to these flavors we can create java, res, values folders inside this folder. We can define separate Manifest file as well for each flavor individually. The directory structure of the PSLab Android project after creating required packages inside the automatically generated src/fdroid and src/playstore folders looks like below,   (Figure 2: Directory structure after creating flavors) Defining Flavor specific dependencies We can have some dependencies for one app flavor and some for others. For example, in PSLab Android app, we need Google Maps dependencies only in playstore flavor and Open Street Maps dependencies only in fdroid flavor. We can easily define…