From what I remember in android build files... having a versionString that changes constantly via different techniques like git sha were frowned upon in the past because it would trigger an update of the AndroidManifest on each run which would invalidate a bunch of stuff. In my case I'm only adding the sha on CI (by adding it to gradle.properties) and then my build file always looks for the suffix

versionName = "1.2.3" + (project.findProperty("versionNameSuffix") ?: "")

is this project.findProperty on

versionName

acceptable, or is this one of those weird things that will invalidate AndroidManifest, causing a bunch of slowness even on local builds (again,

versionNameSuffix

doesn't exist EXCEPT on CI builds)

As long as the final name passed to

versionName

does not change (ie the property value is always missing or always the same), then it should be fine, and not re-run tasks that don't need it. Are you seeing a different behavior than that?

I'm not seeing negative behavior at the moment. So I think we indeed always have the values missing or always the same. Sweet.