Streamlined App Development: White Label Examples for Success

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are constantly searching for innovative ways to bring their products to market quickly and efficiently. Oftentimes by developing a single app and distributing it under different brands to cater to a variety of customers. Think of a scenario in which a tech company develops a robust e-commerce platform, and this company aims to sell the same platform to multiple retail clients, wherein each client wants to reflect their own unique brand identity. Instead of building a separate app for each client from scratch, the company can use the same core app and modify its branding elements, such as logos, app name and colour schemes tailoring it to the app to fit the specific needs of each client. White labelling mobile apps not only accelerate the development process but also allows the company to offer a versatile, market-ready product that meets the diverse needs of its customers.

Companies like Swivel Tech help businesses streamline app development by leveraging white-label solutions, enabling faster deployment while maintaining brand differentiation for each client.

What is White Labelling?

White label application development is a strategy that allows businesses to create a generic version of a software product such as a mobile app that can be customised and rebranded for different clients. The core functionality of the app remains the same. However, elements like the logo, colour palette, and user interface can be tailored to match the individual branding requirements of each client. By leveraging white labelling, companies can efficiently reuse their development efforts across multiple clients, significantly reducing both time and costs associated with launching new apps. It also allows businesses to focus more on scaling their offerings and enhancing customer satisfaction, rather than getting bogged down by repetitive development tasks. This makes white labelling an ideal solution for businesses looking to expand their product reach without reinventing the wheel for each new client.

White Labelling Android Apps

To build white label mobile apps in Android, developers can take advantage of the “product flavors” feature, a versatile tool that enables the creation of multiple versions of an app from a single codebase. For each white label mobile app, a flavor can be created and configured to support different branding, resources, and even functionality, allowing businesses to customise and deliver apps tailored to various clients or markets without duplicating development work.

We can define our flavor configuration in a build.gradle file located in project’s android/app/ directory. Understanding the following concepts is crucial for grasping how Android product flavors work. These concepts provide the foundation for managing multiple versions of an app effectively. Let’s dive into them first:

Build Types

Build types are configurations that the Android Gradle plugin uses when building and packaging an app. By default, every Android project has two build types:

Debug: Used when running the app directly from the IDE to a device. It includes debugging tools and does not require signing for production.

Release: Used to generate the production version of the app. This build type typically includes additional properties like signing configurations, ProGuard rules for code obfuscation, and optimisations for performance.

Developers can define additional build types as needed. For instance, an app may include “debug,” “staging/pre-production,” and “release” build types, each with its own settings, such as different API endpoint base URLs for different environments.

Product Flavors

Product flavors allow us to create different versions of the same app by customising it for specific clients, markets, or use cases. Each version can have its own branding, functionality, and other customisations while sharing the same core codebase. We can define our flavors in the product flavors section of the build.gradle file. In the code snippet below, we’ve specified the application package name for each flavor, ensuring that each version is uniquely identifiable in the app store while maintaining the same underlying functionality.

Build Variants

Build variants are the result of combining each product flavor with available build types. For example, if an app has two product flavors, and three build types, Gradle will generate the following six build variants after syncing:

SwivelGroup-debug
SwivelGroup-Staging
SwivelGroup -Release
SwivelTech-debug
SwivelTech -Staging
SwivelTech -Release

Each build variant represents a unique combination of flavor and build type, allowing us to build and deploy different versions of the app with the appropriate settings for each case.

Defining Sign-in configs

To specify separate signing configurations for each flavor in an Android project, we need to create different keystore files for each flavor and associate them with their respective credentials using the signingConfig attribute in the build.gradle file. This allows each flavor to have its own unique signing key, which is especially useful when different clients or markets require separate app signing for distribution.

Steps to Achieve This:

1. Create Separate Keystore Files:

First, we must generate a keystore file for each flavor using Android Studio or the “keytool” command in the terminal.

Example command to generate a keystore:

2. Define Signing Configurations in build.gradle:

In the android block of the build.gradle file, we need to define individual signingConfig blocks for each flavor. These signingConfig blocks should be linked to their corresponding keystore files and credentials (such as alias, store file, and passwords) to ensure that each flavor has its own signing configuration.

Example:

3. Associate Each Flavor with its Signing Configuration:

Inside each product flavor block (like flavorA and flavorB), specify the signingConfig attribute to link the respective signing configuration.

• SwivelGroup flavor uses swivelGroupRelease config.

• SwivelTech flavor uses swivelTechRelease config.

Flavor customisation

After defining the flavors and all the configurations now we can customise each flavor. Before starting the customisations it’s better to separate all content related to each white label application into separate folders like in below example this will help us to manage unique resources such as app icons, splash screens, related to each app separately. When creating these folders, ensure that you use the exact names as specified in the application package ID in the product flavors section defined in the build.gradle file. For instace, if you use the package name com.swivel.swiveltech, make sure to name the folder as swiveltech.

1. App name customisation

After creating separate folders for each flavor, customisations become much easier. To customise the app names all we need to do is define different app_name values for each flavor in their own strings.xml files. and then we must link that value to the AndroidManifest.xml file so that the app name relevant to the selected flavor will automatically pull during the build process.

2. App Icons

To customise the app icons, we follow the same steps as for the app name. All we need to do is place the respective app icons in the relevant flavor folders,and each flavor will use its own custom icon set during the build process.

Using the Build Variants window, we can easily change the active flavor for our project. Depending on the selected flavor, all flavor-specific resources will be automatically applied during the build process. As shown in the screenshot below, we can successfully run both flavors, each with its own unique app name and app icon.

Conclusion

In conclusion, white labelling mobile apps offers businesses a powerful strategy to deliver customised products efficiently without the need to build from scratch. By understanding what is white labelling, companies can reuse a core product—like mobile apps—and tailor it for multiple clients with unique branding. This approach saves time, reduces development costs, and allows businesses to scale faster.

White labelling your mobile app development, showcases how brands can launch market-ready solutions quickly by leveraging shared codebases with customised elements such as app names, icons, and colours. For this, this article explores white label examples to demonstrate the versatility of this approach, enabling businesses to expand their reach while maintaining efficiency. Whether for Android or iOS, white labelling ensures seamless app deployment, empowering companies to meet diverse customer needs without compromising on quality or performance.

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