QA and PROD application in Google Play Store

Question

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?

Have you already checked [this SO post about building different flavors for different version of same class](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23698863/build-flavors-for-different-version-of-same-class)? — MαπμQμαπkγVπ.0, Sep 14 '18 at 10:15

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 14 '18 at 07:26

5

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.

answered Sep 14 '18 at 07:26

Nick Fortescue

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Thanks! I will deploy the QA as another version of the app. – JustAnotherDev Sep 14 '18 at 17:14

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 14 '18 at 07:41

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.

Thanks! I was hoping to take it 1 step further and use Jenkins to automate the deploy of the apk. It is just easier for our QA to download the file using google play store instead of Google Drive as an example — JustAnotherDev, Sep 14 '18 at 17:12

QA and PROD application in Google Play Store

2 Answers2