Tag Archives: version

Android, Smartphone, Android Developer, Android Studio

Auto ‘versionCode’ increment when building production apk’s

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Since I adopted Fabric as a way to monitor vital app stats such as ‘Time in App per User‘ and it’s Beta distribution platform to distribute test builds, increasing APK’s versionCode numbers became a tedious task.

I decided to simplify the things by letting Gradle to do auto versionCode increments when producing release APK’s

Our implementation of build number increments will consist of a property file named version.properties located in the root folder of our project.

The property file will contain 2 variables, one defining the version name such as “2.3” and one defining the version code such as 15

VERSION_NAME=2.3
VERSION_CODE=19

In our app module build.gradle file

build.gradle

we will define a function which takes care of retrieving the a bough mentioned values from the properties file and increment the VERSION_CODE if needed.

/**
 * Get's value from 'version.properties' file
 * @param varName the name of the variable which value we wan't to get.
 * @return the variable value.
 */
def getVersionPropertiesValue(def varName)
{
    def propertiesFile = file('version.properties')
 
    if(!propertiesFile.canRead()) {
        throw new GradleException("Could not read " + propertiesFile.name)
    }
 
    Properties properties = new Properties();
    properties.load(new FileInputStream(propertiesFile))
 
    def propertyValue = properties[varName]
    if(varName == 'VERSION_CODE')
    {
        // If we are building release increment the version code
        List gradleTasksNames = gradle.startParameter.getTaskNames();
        for(String taskName : gradleTasksNames)
        {
            if(taskName.contains("Release"))
            {
                propertyValue = propertyValue.toInteger() + 1
                properties[varName] = propertyValue.toString()
                properties.store(propertiesFile.newWriter(), null)
                break
            }
        }
    }
 
    return propertyValue
}

In the defaultConfig section of the gradle build script we will call this function to retrieve values for the versionName and versionCode of our app.

android {
    compileSdkVersion 28
 
    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.example.foo"
        versionCode Integer.valueOf(getVersionPropertiesValue('VERSION_CODE'))
        versionName getVersionPropertiesValue('VERSION_NAME')
        minSdkVersion 14
        targetSdkVersion 28
    }
}

Now each time a release build is made, the version code will increment automatically. If we want to change the version name we can do so by changing the value of VERSION_NAME property.