Question

I’m trying to find the best way to build/package an Android app for 6+ different customers. I could use different branches in SVN for all of the customers, but the only difference between the apps are some values in the resource folder (drawables, strings, etc).

I wrote an ant script that imports the standard Android build.xml. This script does the following:

1. Reads the customer names from a properties file.
2. For each customer the following is done:
   1. The package name in AndroidManifest.xml is changed (by hooking into the -pre-build target).
   2. The custom resources are copied into the res directory in the build (by hooking into the -pre-compile target).
   3. The package name is changed back to the default value (by hooking into the -post-compile target).
   4. The APK is copied to a specific location an named something like customer-versionno.apk.

This seemed to work well until I just now wrote the part that changes the package name. Because of the package name change the location of the R class is also changed, meaning that the build fails as the Java classes import the R class from the standard package.

I don’t want to have a build script that changes code. I want to be able to do this with minimum changes to any files.

Soo..the questions are really:

1. Are there any good/simple solutions for my problem?
2. Am I approaching this problem in the wrong way? Are there better ways to easily package the same app to 6+ different customers?

Answer 1

Is it possible to solve this with making 6+ different projects that includes your main projekt. This way you are able to override resources and make different apk’s