This repo demonstrates the use of Android Gradle Plugin's matchingFallbacks and missingDimensionStrategy features. These are used when an Android project has multiple modules with dependencies on each other, and these modules do not agree on the number of flavor dimensions or flavors.

Repo structure

The app itself is a shell. It has no activities, no functionality and almost no Android code. It has 4 modules:

1. app module. Depends on intermediate-1,intermediate-2 and leaf
2. intermediate-1 module. Depends on leaf
3. intermediate-2 module. Depends on leaf
4. leaf module. Has no dependencies

Flavors

• Only app and leaf modules care about flavors. I named the dimension as "target" and the flavors as "emulator" and "realdevice" but it doesn't really matter what you call them.
• The intermediate modules don't care and don't even need to know about flavors.

String resources

To demonstrate how flavors work, I've created some string resources (using gradle's resValue feature) in every flavor, in every module that does care about the flavor. When I build an APK for a particular flavor, I can inspect the string resource in APK analyzer to figure out which variant was used.

In this commit

In this commit, I've basically introduced the same flavor dimensions and flavors in the intermediate modules. I know we started off saying these modules don't care about flavors, but this is the only correct way to do it. This is because the intermediate modules are both of the following

• Providers for a module that has a flavor dimension
• Consumers of another module that also has the same flavor dimension

Note: If you don't have these intermediate flavors setup that I demonstrate in this repo, you can absolutely use missingDimensionStrategy or matchingFallback depending on your situation.

I extracted the flavor config to a separate file for use in intermediate flavors. See flavors.gradle