I would like to know if there is a way to launch and/or build an ARC app from Android Studio without having to manually use ARC welder every time.
It can be pretty cumbersome to do this manually during development, and especially during a release when you have to do the same operation to ~15 different flavors of the same app. Is there anything in to works that solves this issue like a gradle extension or something.
As of the time of this writing, no official automated ARC building solution has been offered. It's ARC Welder or bust.
That being said, since the Chrome extension (CRX) has an open specification, and since the contents of the CRX (as a ZIP file) are easy to examine, reverse-engineering what ARC Welder does and creating a Gradle plugin or something would not be that difficult for somebody with the itch to scratch.
When I examined it, the obvious variable bits were the icon.png (96x96 px edition of your launcher icon), the APK itself in vendor/chromium/crx/, and the arc_metadata portion of the manifest.json file. The latter is where your ARC Welder settings go, like the form factor and orientation.
Of course, any homebrew solution would need to track changes to ARC Welder to ensure that it kept producing valid ARC files.
