CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidgradleandroid-productflavors
Ilya Gazman
Ilya Gazman

Reputation: 32221

Flavors vs. Libraries?

I just finished watching Xavier Ducrohet presentation about gradle, and I am about to start using flavors. I want to understand what are their big advantage over libraries?

I know that android library can have it's own manifest / resources and of course sources, and so does flavors. But what else is there? Why should I use them?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 578

Answers (1)

Bryan Herbst
Bryan Herbst

Reputation: 67189

Flavors and libraries aren't really comparable.

A library is typically a discrete piece of functionality that you can reuse across multiple projects. It might provide a piece of functionality that you use frequently or it might provide a custom View that you find yourself using in a lot of applications.

Product flavors are slightly different versions of the same application. The most common example is a paid vs. free app- with product flavors you can have a single codebase that generates both versions. Another more simplified example would be an app that is available in two colors- you might have a red product flavor and a blue product flavor. In this case the only difference might be a single color string in your resources.

Where I think the confusion is coming from is that you can use a library to accomplish the goals of the product flavor system. That is, you can take your common functionality and place it in a library project that you include in each of the versions of your application. This is a messy way to accomplish the goal of having two apps with only minor variation between them, and if this is your goal, you should use product flavors instead.

From the Gradle Plugin User Guide:

If the answer to “Is this the same application?” is yes, then this is probably the way to go over Library Projects.

Upvotes: 9

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