Creating product flavors is very similar to creating build types. You can create a new product flavor by adding it to the productFlavor block, like this:

android {
    productFlavors {
        red {
            applicationId 'com.gradleforandroid.red'
            versionCode 3
        }
        blue {
            applicationId 'com.gradleforandroid.blue'
            minSdkVersion 14
            versionCode 4
        }
    }
}

Product flavors have different properties than build types. That is because product flavors are objects of the ProductFlavor class, just like the defaultConfig object that is present in all build scripts. This means that defaultConfig and all your product flavors share the same properties.

Just like with build types, product flavors can have their own source set directories. Creating a folder for a specific flavor is as easy as creating a folder with the flavor name. You can even go one step further and create a folder specifically for a combination of a certain build type and flavor. The name of the folder would then be the flavor name followed by the build type name. For example, if you want to have a different app icon specifically for the release version of the blue flavor, the folder would have to be called blueRelease. The components of the combined folder will have a higher priority than the components from both the build type folder and the product flavor folder.

In some cases, you might want to take it further and create combinations of product flavors. For example, client A and client B might each want free and paid versions of their app, which is based on the same code base, but has different branding. Creating four different flavors would mean having several duplicate settings, so that is not the way to go. Combining flavors in an efficient way is possible using flavor dimensions, like this:

android {
    flavorDimensions "color", "price"

    productFlavors {
        red {
            flavorDimension "color"
        }

        blue {
            flavorDimension "color"
        }
        free {
            flavorDimension "price"
        }

        paid {
            flavorDimension "price"
        }
    }
}

As soon as you add the flavor dimensions, Gradle expects you to specify a dimension for each flavor. If you forget, you will get a build error with a message explaining the issue. The flavorDimensions array defines the dimensions, and the order of the dimensions is very important. When combining two flavors, they might have defined the same properties or resources. In that case, the order of the flavor dimensions array determines which flavor configuration overrides the other. In the earlier example, the color dimension overrides the price dimension. The order also determines the name of the build variant.

Assuming the default build configuration with the debug and release build types, defining the flavors as shown in the previous example will generate all of these build variants: