Testing variant of app with different applicationId

[felixwiemuth]

To be able to test a development version of an app on a device where a release version is already installed, in my projects I use different application IDs on the main and development branches. It is usually enough to simply add a suffix, e.g. ".dev" to applicationId in the app's build.gradle.

However, it does not seem to work for this app: changing applicationId = "org.isoron.uhabits.dev" in uhabits-android/build.gradle.kts and then trying to run the build on a device where the release version (F-Droid) of the app is already installed gives the following error in AndroidStudio:

Installation failed due to: 'Failed to commit install session 1740578856 with command cmd package install-commit 1740578856. Error: INSTALL_FAILED_CONFLICTING_PROVIDER: Scanning Failed.: Can't install because provider name org.isoron.uhabits (in package org.isoron.uhabits.dev) is already used by org.isoron.uhabits'

Where is that provider name defined / at what other places is the application ID mentioned and has to be changed? (This shouldn't have anything to do with the package name in AndroidManifest.xml, which can be removed and replaced by namespace = "org.isoron.uhabits" in build.gradle).

Would it be an option to apply this approach in this repository, i.e. have the dev branch permanently change the application ID to have a ".dev" suffix? (If one commits this on the dev branch, one can have another branch dev-staging or so where this is removed again and from where one merges into release branches; or one always merges the commit which removes the suffix when creating a release branch.)

[felixwiemuth]

I found the places where one has to make further changes, all in AndroidManifest.xml:

• The android:host attributes have to point to the application ID; to make this generic, one can use android:host="${applicationId}"
• The relative names within <meta-data> tags are not resolved correctly to the package namespace but to the application ID and have to be therefore manually mapped to the namespace, e.g. android:value="${namespace}.activities.habits.list.ListHabitsActivity".
  • For this, it needs a definition manifestPlaceholders["namespace"] = "org.isoron.uhabits" in uhabits-android/build.gradle.kts under defaultConfig.

Applying these changes to the codebase, it really needs a single difference between development and release/other branches for having a different application ID, and this is the applicationId field in uhabits-android/build.gradle.kts.