Service to handle experimental features in the app

[maskaravivek]

Summary:

Here's my visualization of a service that can handle experimental features.

We write a simple service called GatekeeperService. The responsibility of this service will be to:

Control the access of any feature at a very granular level.

It will look like:

public interface GatekeeperService() {
    boolean isGatekeeperEnabled(String gatekeeperName);
}

And gatekeeperName can be:

- is_search_nearby_location_enabled
- is_retry_failed_upload_enabled
- is_review_uploads_enabled
- is_multiple_in_app_uploads_enabled

isGatekeeperEnabled can return if a particular feature(key) is true or false.

In the most simplistic form, it can decide to enable/disable any feature on the basis of product flavor.

These are all the things based on which we can enable/disable any feature for a particular user:

• has user enabled experimental features or not
• Flavor: Beta/Alpha/Prod
• Android Version
• Username
• Country or location.

[vanshikaarora]

Hey can you elaborate(or provide with examples) where will you require the app to enable/disable some features for a particular user

[albendz]

Would something like FireBase be sufficient for this rather than writing a new service? Are there limitations on pre-existing cloud solutions we may not be able to use?

[maskaravivek]

Would something like FireBase be sufficient for this rather than writing a new service? Are there limitations on pre-existing cloud solutions we may not be able to use?

In fact, we require something exactly like Firebase Remote config but due to privacy reasons, we might not want to use a 3rd party service.