Fuck the Android Build Process

This doesn't sound so bad. After reading the paragraph that ended with "Confused? Yeah I was too..." I wasn't confused at all, actually your explanation was good and basically makes sense to me. Maybe not ideal, but that being said, the fact that you were able to come up with what looks like a pretty decent work around is really a credit to the process. The command line Ant tools enable all kinds of customized stuff as well as supporting using tools other than Eclipse. (at my last job we heavily customized it to support building "branded" apps that were released to the market with different package names and images) I'm pretty glad that they based the build system on it, even though Ant itself is terrifying.<p>I guess after working on BlackBerry apps, I'm spoiled by Android's tools. (to build a BB app of even moderate complexity and deploy it to a device, you have to contact a RIM server. Every. single. time. That and the Eclipse plugin was straight up broken for a long time)

I wasn't, at all, confused by the solution derived in the article. Ant is fairly common to Java builds I've worked with. But why not have VCS hooks to fix per-dev, testing, staging, and release configurations? I know of dozens exotic build processes, and this seems rather tame.

Not able to try this out right now but:<p>1. You can select a custom debug key in eclipse and have multiple devs sign with the same debug key.<p>2. You <i>should</i> be able to instantiate the MapView in the code at runtime (don't have a dev set up to try this on right now but check out MapView(android.content.Context context, java.lang.String apiKey)). Just provide the API key based off a debug/release flag set in your code.

Resource overlays might have solved the problem a bit More gracefully. They allow you to specify additional resource directories that take precedence over the default one. I don't have a link at the moment, but google should be able to tell you something. You'd still have to hack around with the build file a bit, but if you're a java/android programmer you should know about ant anyway.<p>As long as you're learning about java build tools, take a look at the android maven plugin. It can be useful once you outgrow the confines of the default android build process.

"Ant? Why do I know Ant now? I didn’t know Ant 2 days ago. Is it really necessary to have to learn a build tool to perform such a common task?"<p>Ant is the backstop to the build the IDE makes automatically, in cases, like this one, where there isn't a parameter you can set in the build options dialog.<p>You might not like ant, or having to learn it. But it's not an unusual choice for Java builds. There are many cases in more-complex Android project builds where ant is necessary.

Why can't you just use a config file?

Do you guys think that the frustrating for building on Android has made more developers switch over the just developing on iOS?

If only there were a tool to help automate some of the finer details of Java application development

Someone hasn't tried to do Azure development with Visual Studio if they think this Release/Debug type management is a nightmare. Oh let me name the number of inconsistent ways of transforming config files depending on environments.