My app has a massive amount of data so for development iteration we don't want to push that data to the device every build. We put the data on the SD Card and use the MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission to read & write there during development. We remove this permission for Production.
This works fine for my main variant (com.mycompany.app). The first time the app is run, my code opens the Settings|File Permissions page and the user can turn on this permission for my app.
When my app variant (com.mycompany.app.test) is installed, both apps appear as expected on the phone's launcher but the variant doesn't appear on the File Permissions page. Why is this happening and how can I fix it?
I don't know if it's valid but my theory is that somehow this permission is based on PACKAGE name instead of BUNDLE ID. Because my other permissions, such as notifications, show up properly for the app variant. But because PACKAGE name must be the same for every variant, this could explain the behavior. Perhaps there's something I can put in the gradle file that would address the issue?