Other Stuff in the android Closure

The android closure has a testInstrumentationRunner statement — we will explore that more in an upcoming chapter, to see how testing works.

The android closure also has a buildTypes closure. This provides specific configuration for different “build types”, such as debug for development builds and release for production builds. The defaults provided in the starter project are fine for many basic apps.

The compileOptions and kotlinOptions closures indicate that we want the Java and Kotlin compilers to generate JVM 1.8 bytecode. While JVM bytecode has advanced a lot since then, 1.8 is the newest that Android supports at this time.