I find little to no information on what's the difference between these two
flutter build bundle
flutter build appbundle
When should I use one over the other?
flutter build appbundle
builds the 'app bundle' that is uploaded to the Google Play store. The app bundle is basically a bundle of apk
files. When a user installs your app, Google Play will serve the optimal apk
to the device. The app bundle is compressed into a aab
file (Android app bundle).
flutter build bundle
builds a special 'app bundle' archive from the list of assets in your pubspec.yaml
that your app can read from at runtime. The builder places this in the flutter_assets
folder in the build
directory.
So basically they build different stuff. flutter build appbundle
is pretty much unavoidable if you're building an app for release on the Play Store.
However, I have never needed to use flutter build bundle
. I have never needed to build an individual assets folder as it's incorporated within an appbundle
build.