Android Studio: Switching a URL depending on buildtype? (used for testing in debug /release)

You can use the BuildConfig for supplying different URLs for each BuildType

buildTypes {
    debug {
        buildConfigField "String", "SERVER_URL", '"http://someurl/"'
    }
    release{
        buildConfigField "String", "SERVER_URL", '"http://someotherurl/"'
    }
}   

The BuildConfig will be autogenerated each time you sync your project with the gradle file. In your code, you can access the URL like this:

BuildConfig.SERVER_URL

If you don't want to commit these URLs, you can store them in your gradle.properties just like your password and such and reference them in the build.gradle.

buildConfigField "String", "SERVER_URL", serverurl.debug

   buildTypes {
    release {
        runProguard false
        proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        buildConfigField "String", "BASE_URL", '"url1"'
        debuggable false

    }

   debug {
        runProguard false
        proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        buildConfigField "String", "BASE_URL", '"url2"'
        debuggable true

 }

This you need to do in the gradle and to make run two applications(release and debug) in a same phone just add

applicationIdSuffix ".debug"

in debug portion. As the package name will be different. This worked for me.