Write once, ship multiple times
summary
A practical guide to building Android white‑label apps: aim for 90–95% shared code, prefer a thin client architecture over fat clients to avoid forced updates, use Gradle flavors vs modules deliberately (flavors for fast starts, modules for isolated customization), extract features into packages with single entry points, program to interfaces and inject implementations, use BuildConfig and remote JSON/XML configs for runtime toggles, semantic versioning with major systemwide breaks, and a client library to enforce mandatory updates; a theme‑park refactor took three months and scaled to thousands of apps.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction to white label systems
- 7:22Evolution of Android development
- 10:15Fat vs thin client architectures
- 12:00Flavor vs module architecture
- 17:02Grouping functionalities into features
- 19:50Customization with build config
- 21:39Customization with config files
- 24:32Programming to interfaces
- 27:58Practical customization examples
- 32:37Handling excessive customization
- 34:01Refactoring and extraction
- 35:48Versioning strategies
- 38:42Enforcing app updates
- 39:45Key takeaways and best practices
- 40:51Q&A
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