Before adding the following configuration to our app-level build.gradle, it was working as expected

Kotlin

android {
    defaultConfig {
        ...
        resourceConfigurations.addAll(listOf("en", "fr"))
    }
}

Groovy

android {
    defaultConfig {
        ...
        resConfigs "en", "fr"
         // Or
        resourceConfigurations += ["en", "fr"] 
    }
}

So what does this config do:

Definition from Android developer’s documentation

Remove unused alternative resources 👇

The Gradle resource shrinker removes only resources that are not referenced by your app code, which means it will not remove alternative resources for different device configurations. If necessary, you can use the Android Gradle plugin’s resConfigs property to remove alternative resource files that your app does not need.

For example, if you are using a library that includes language resources (such as AppCompat or Google Play Services), then your app includes all translated language strings for the messages in those libraries whether the rest of your app is translated to the same languages or not. If you’d like to keep only the languages that your app officially supports, you can specify those languages using the resConfig property. Any resources for languages not specified are removed.

The main advantage of this is that it helps us remove all of the resources that we do not need for our application

At this point, I hope you understand why localization support for French is broken in our case.

For our application, we added the configuration to specify that we only need the Two following resources:👇

resConfigs "en", "fr"
         // Or
resourceConfigurations += ["en", "fr"]

Therefore, Resource Shrinker removes thefr-rCA 🇨🇦 resources and we only have [“en”, “fr”] resources available for our application.

It’s time to fix it

• To resolve this issue quickly, there are a few options:

1st

• Update the build.gradle to not remove fr-rCA 🇨🇦 resources

android {
    defaultConfig {
        ...
        resConfigs "en", "fr", "fr-rCA"
         // Or
        resourceConfigurations += ["en", "fr", "fr-rCA"] 
    }
}