3. Make sure to select the correct build variant in Android Studio. See the next section.
### Guide to Build Variants
We have a lot of build variants. Each variant is composed of two flavors. One flavor is the version of Gecko to use and the other describes
which app id and settings to use. Here is a description of what each means:
- **debug** uses debug symbols and debug signing, adds tools like LeakCanary for troubleshooting, and does not strip unused or wasteful code
- **nightly** uses the Nightly variant of the Gecko rendering engine, which is the version which will arrive after beta and is less stable
- **beta** (recommended) uses the Beta variant of the Gecko rendering engine, which corresponds to the next version of Gecko which will go to production
- **release** is a release build with release signing which uses the org.mozilla.firefox app id for production releases to Google Play
### Build Variants
For general development, we recommend the **debug** build variant. Here's an explanation of each variant:
- **debug**: the default for developers, similar to most other Android apps. It is debuggable, uses a Nightly GeckoView with debug symbols, adds tools like LeakCanary for troublingshooting, and does not strip unused code.
- **nightly**: what we ship to the Firefox Nightly channel, using GeckoView Nightly.
- **beta**: what we ship to the Firefox Beta channel, using GeckoView Beta. It is more stable than nightly.
- **release**: what we ship as Firefox for Android, using GeckoView Release. It is the most stable.
nightly, beta, and release are unsigned and `debuggable=false` by default. If
you want these variants to be:
- automatically signed, see [Automatically signing release builds](#automatically-sign-release-builds)
- `debuggable=true`, see [Building debuggable release variants](#building-debuggable-release-variants)
#### Performance Build Variants
For accurate performance measurements, read this section!
Michael Comella
4 years ago
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Michael Comella