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Looking for a better way to test app interactions with Play Store updates. Our Android app is a launcher so it needs to look at the applications installed on the Android device. We recently found that our app was impacted (negatively) by Play Store updates of other apps (the negative impact isn't important to this question but the Play Store updates causes our app to cease knowing about update apps). We found the problem and believe we have fixed it but the only way we could think of to test it was to do a before and after comparison of the device after doing one or more updates. The problem is you have to wait for relevant updates to appear in Play Store as ready to install.

I am hoping someone has evolved a way to test this functionaliy in a repeatable, non-tedious manner. One idea I came up with was to put some dummy apps in the Play Store...just for the purpose of testing update interaction.

Joel Butler
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If you want to test the updates from the Play Store less tediously, the play store offers an Internal Test Track where updates are available almost immediately (here are the steps to set up). To set it up on a phone for the first time, you need to set up the track from the play store release console, create a testing email, and press on an opt-in link on the phone. This initial process might take a while, but subsequent updates to the app on the internal track on the playstore are available on the phone almost immediately (a minute or two).

If you just want to test how your app holds up to being updated for backwards compatibility reasons, then you should sideload your APK using ADB using adb install old-version.apk, and then simulate an update from the playstore using adb install -r new-version.apk, which replaces the existing APK without clearing any of the app's data, just like a Play Store update

Can_of_awe
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  • Regret I didn't make this clearer. Your answer seems to be about how to test updates to our application, which is not the concern (though you point out how to do that). The concern is other applications being updated...we want to test our application "X" and see how other application updates (say: Slack, Gmail, WhatsApp, etc) will impact the operation of our application "X". As it stands we can test this aspect when there are updates to be had from the Play Store (for Slack, etc) but we would like to not be dependent on those updates appearing. – Joel Butler Jan 18 '19 at 20:21