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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

fapps
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  • possible duplicate of [Using Build Flavors - Structuring source folders and build.gradle correctly](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16737006/using-build-flavors-structuring-source-folders-and-build-gradle-correctly) – 323go Feb 04 '15 at 21:13

1 Answers1

5

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.

LukaCiko
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  • If I may ask, what would you consider be the best approach for removing adds using the in app purchase method? – Marcus Feb 11 '15 at 23:53