CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidgoogle-playgoogle-play-services
JustAnotherDev
JustAnotherDev

Reputation: 305

QA and PROD application in Google Play Store

I have an app that is published in the Google Play Store for my users (lets say 1000 users). I would like to publish a QA version of the app for a subset of those users (lets say 10 users). When I went through the process of publishing an alpha version of the app, I noticed that I could no longer download the production version. I can either download the alpha or the production (if I un-register as an alpha user).

Is the only way to have a QA and PROD version of my application on the Google Play Store, and thereby on my android device, is by creating multiple apps on play.google.com? Or can I have an alpha release and a production release of the same application and be able to install both on the same device?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2006

Answers (2)

PK Gupta
PK Gupta

Reputation: 822

As per my understanding Google Play ecosystem is not to support your Dev/QA/Prod flavors. It's designed to test your Production version of apps only. Internal Test, Alpha Test and Beta test are designed to gradually test the impact of release.

If you want to distribute your Dev/QA/Prod flavors and keep all versions installed on a device use applicationIdSuffix. E.g. for qa you can use ".qa", for dev ".dev" and keep prod as default. Even you can make the configuration for generating unique apk name for all flavors.

For distribution you can use any platform e.g Microsoft appcentre or directly distribute apk through any filesharing platform.

Upvotes: 5

Nick Fortescue
Nick Fortescue

Reputation: 13832

The only way to have both on your device is to publish it as two separate apps on Google Play. This is a constraint of android, not Google Play. Each app is identified by an application id, sometimes called a package name. An android device can only have one version of each package name installed at once.

Upvotes: 7

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