For example, you could enable Crashlytics for non release variants, and see the reports on a different Firebase account, without generating noise on the production Crashlytics console.

Support to use one Firebase account per environment.

For example, having the production bundle installed on your device is useful to quickly detect and try to reproduce production issues. This is useful for developers because they can test and debug all the different variants without uninstalling them to switch.

Ability to install multiple variants of the app on the same device at the same time.

Here are the two main benefits you will get: This article proposes to use a different approach, where you define a different applicationId for each variant.

For example, you can’t install different variants of your app on the same device at the same time, because you have an applicationId conflict. This is the default approach and uses to bring some limitations. Lots of Android developers use the same applicationId for all the app variants ( debug, release, etc).

Android studio install production build