Multiple Apps with a shared code base
<p>Since it's popular to have both a free and a paid version in the android market of the same app, I had decided to do the same. Initially I just duplicated the complete codebase and adapted some code here and there (added ads, built in some limitations etc) since there was no option to do library projects at that time, but that left me with two projects that are horrific to manage fixes to bugs as I need to do those twice. </p>

<p>Since r14 we can use library projects with resources, so that would be a great solution to this particular problem as far as I can tell. Therefore I've read up on <a href="http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/projects/index.html#LibraryProjects" rel="nofollow">library projects</a> and conciderations, and I'm curious to know what the minimum amount of files needed in the projects of the different versions are. My questions therefore are;</p>

<ul>
<li>Could I have all of the code in the shared project, and have bare bone project with basically just a manifest?
<ul>
<li>If so, should I? is this the optimal way conceptually? (so apart from the fact that it depends on my code base)</li>
</ul></li>
<li>How should I deal with library package naming, are there specific rules?</li>
<li>Are there tools about that can compare code from two different projects and perhaps merge them auto-magically or auto-manually, and which one is preferred?</li>
</ul>
