I have to distribute Android apps within my organization. I have a google developer account. Below it tells to login to the admin console to enable private channel.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/2494992?hl=en
Problem -it does not sign me in as Google help states that
my.account#company.com, doesn't have an administrator but is instead managed by Google.
Requirement - So how can i get the administrator account.
Any help will be appreciated.
Regards
You can provide the .apk files directly to your organization.
Either you can allow to download a signed .apk file through a web site which will launch the install procedure or you can make an app market which provides a list of .apk files and installs them automatically, as Amazon's App Shop.
I'm not sure if Google account allows you to share app locally. But we use Hockeyapp to do the same. It works great. You can even integrate it to your app and upload the crashes too. Many other features. Take a look at this to know other solutions. It supports iOS as well as Android and offers a good user experience.
But you've to pay a bit for it. CashAnalytics is free. Do small research for yourself.
I have used crashlytics for this purpose in my last project.
It works great for beta distribution in development phase.
Also, it's crash reporting is excellent to guide you to the source code line causing crashes.
Related
My app is now in the alpha status and I would like to distribute it to a few people (QA, alpha testers...) without making the app public. I know, that google play offers a private channel to distribute apps in alpha/beta state to some people, but according to the website it takes a few hours until the application is available. However, I would like to have it available for users as soon as a new build is ready and uploaded. I thought about setting up a private android repository (e.q f-droid), but unfortunately I could not find anything in the documentation about securing the android repository - I want it to be protected somehow (key, password...).
Another possibility would be to set up a web-server and host the different build versions on that server. Then the testers have to navigate to that site and download the appropriate build version. However, from the usability point of view it isn't that nice - user have to download the version manually and install it afterwards. Also for the QA guys it would be nicer, if it is easier to switch between different android builds.
How would you solve this problem? Is there already any software out there, that is suitable for that task?
Any help is really appreciated.
I know Google says it can take a few hours, in my experience, it happens very quickly, a few minutes at most. I don't know if there are times when it takes longer.
I thought about setting up a private android repository (e.q f-droid), but unfortunately I could not find anything in the documentation about securing the android repository - I want it to be protected somehow (key, password...).
While perhaps not in the docs, F-Droid does support HTTP Authentication on its repositories. For example, if using Apache you can add a relevant .htpasswd and .htaccess file in the webroot. This will result in the webserver sending back a 401 and asking the client to authenticate. F-Droid responds by prompting with a username/password dialog.
I would suggest using Crashlytics. Crashlytics is now integrated in Fabric.
Crashlytics allows you to distrubute beta versions of your app. Testers only have to install the install the Crashlytics app, and enable installing apps from different sources. You specify which users can test the app by emailadress.
The app allows testers to switch between any version of your app, and install any possible other apps they are invited for.
You can also integrate Crashlytics in your app. If you do you get notified of errors that occured complete with stacktraces, and additional information about the device. This makes bugfixing easier.
I uploaded an app I developed to google play. Since the app isn't free, google doesn't allow me to download it to my device.
The first users who tried to download my app claimed they got the 505 error (by leaving their comments on google play).
I read some threads about this error here on stackoverflow and made some changes that hopefully fix the problem, but how can I check it myself? Do I need to use other people's devices and pay each time I want to check if my app is downloadable or is there a better option ?
thanks
edit: just to be clear - I'm looking for a way to see whether people can download and install my app without getting any error messages. Preferably by going to the google play and downloading it myself.
The app itself works great once it's downloaded and installed. The problem was that people couldn't download/install it on their device.
You can use Google Administration to check erros and statistics for your apps.
Login to your Google Account on this page:
https://play.google.com/apps/publish
There you'll find all your uploaded apps. You'll also find crash reports, etc. Just for better administration of your apps.
To test your app the best way is to use the debug or Run 'app' option in Android Studio. If you want to test the signed apk you can also build it inside Android Stuido with the Build -> Generate Signed APK option.
Or you use the console commands if you don't use an IDE.
Check the documentation of the ADB (Android Debug Bridge)
http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html
I hope this helps.
Is it possible to deploy an APP to android play store, but only allow internal company user to download the APP. Actually, we can distribute the android APP apk to staff to install, but the version upgrade is difficult for apk distribution.
Don't know if there has any method to do so for allowing internal staff install only
Even though you could use the Google Play alpha/beta testing & staged rollouts for this, it does feel a lot like a hack/workaround to me.
As far as I know, those are the "official" options for internal distribution:
1. Private Channel
Pro:
all the benefits of Google play, but only visible to your internal users
Contra:
requires all users to be in your Google Apps domain
no targeting per user or group, will be available to everybody in the domain
app can only be published to public or private channel, not both
2. Custom .apk distribution
Pro:
easy distribution (simply setup internal page or email with .apk link)
Contra:
no automatic app updates via Google Play --> you need to implement an own mechanism
users will have to deal with "unknown source" warning upon installation
3. MDM / Android for Work
Pro:
full control over who will get the app and updates
Contra:
way higher effort and/or cost to implement and maintain
I use the Alpha/Beta system for that. You can make a group on GoogleGroups and allow only the email address in it to download the app from playStore. Maybe, it is available in release mod.
you can use push-link.com, they would provide a great solution for you
Disclaimer : I'm a customer of them
You can create a Beta distribution for a private community for test.
See this link
Have a look at this Deploy apps for in-House usage. This is a late answer. But it might help someone.
I implemented a continuous integration pipeline using Jenkins, but as final step I want Jenkins to deploy/upload the signed APK file to Google Play Store and AndroidPit. I looked for Jenkins/Hudson plugins but only found two: one for Appaloosa and one for Zubhium.
I have a working developer account both on Google Play and on AndroidPit and can manually upload the APK that Jenkins produces. But my question is: Does anybody know a way to teach Jenkins (e.g. via a shell script?) to upload the APK to the mentioned app stores?
There is a Google Play Android Publisher plugin for Jenkins which uses the Google Play Publishing API, announced at Google I/O 2014.
Google has also released Java and Python libraries to help make use of the API.
For more info on the API, see also:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2014/07/grow-with-google-play-scaled-publishing.html
I can talk only for Google's Play Store. There is a way, but be warned, it isn't beautiful, you have to code your solution. I am right now writing a Bachelor Thesis to solve this problem - "Continuous Delivery for Android Applications". My solution is mine, this means I don't raise a claim to have the perfect solution, but I can say it is quite working prototype.
I found out the following:
The first Solution is none. Google offers an Play Store API, but it lacks to upload stuff. Seems that they were already thinking about to make such an API, but it only offers In-App billing control
The 2nd solution is to use Apache HttpComponents Library, which lets you implement your own Client for the Google Play Developer Console, but HttpClient lacks a JavaScript Interpreter... Several ways to implement or add one. But of course, not the easiest way.
The 3rd Solution I am working on, is to use Selenium Web Browser Automation Framework. So basically I create PageObjects from those Play Store Pages and dialogues. After that you can create some Factory to maintain "pathes" of controlling these PageObjects.
Using them you have two options as far as I can see, for instance the WebDriver Objects which uses an "invisible" browser process like FF or Chrome and another I use is ChromeDriver which uses a visible Browser process, to perform the User actions. And don't forget to have Exception Handlers, which scans the Webpage for appearing errors, while in use.
There are a lot of pitfalls, due to possible changes in the Design from Google, which lets your Software break. But there are also some ways to handle that. =) And create an XML containing all valueable information about an app, which comes in handy, when continueing to the next step.
You can create a Maven Plugin. This you can load into your Continuous Integration Server. I hope I could help you a bit.
Since Google Play released the upload API, a plugin has been made:
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=73533143
I haven't tried it yet, but looks like it's exactly what we were looking for.
There are other plugins that claim to do the same (thanks #mdt)
https://github.com/DavidHamm/google-play-publisher 404-this page does not exist
https://github.com/orrc/google-play-android-publisher-plugin
I believe it is not included in the PlayStore API currently to reduce stress on the system and to avoid abuse.
I believe we may see this in the gradle plugin and in the IDE in the future.
While we wait for google decide to open up the API, here is a solution, that is so sill, that i just had to propose it:
If you have a GUI, use GUI automation for the last step.
Google Play Android Publisher plugin for Jenkins is a good one. However, it doesn't support uploading descriptions and screenshots (at least for now).
I found decent Gradle plugin, called Gradle Play Publisher. It supports uploading apk, updating Metadata, and uploading screenshots. And it only needs a few steps to setup.
First go to Google Play Console in a browser, open the page for your app, and look for the option to allow a new email address to upload APKs. If it's not there, it probably means you are not the administrator of that Play Store account and you need to ask the person who is the administrator to add it for you (on a per-app basis). To find out what email address to add, go to Google Developer Service Accounts and create a JSON key for any of your existing Google developer service accounts, or create a new service account with a JSON key. Note the email address associated with the service account for which you have created (or will create) the JSON key. It will most likely be something at gserviceaccount.com. This is the email address that must be given permission to upload APKs by someone who has admin access to your Play account.
After that has been done, download Madison Dickson's updated version of Marta Rodriguez's script via wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mix3d/665f4ab329b4482297a2f425ebba402c/raw/0949385dd6c80d0701170746b1bd5fd479303412/basic_upload_apks_service_account.py and install dependencies via pip install google-api-python-client (or sudo pip install google-api-python-client as appropriate).
Then in the automated script you can use (for example) python basic_upload_apks_service_account.py -t beta -p org.example.MyApp -s JSON_file_I_made.json -a MyApp.apk (assuming your JSON file, your APK, and basic_upload_apks_service_account.py are all in the current directory and the pip install has been done on that machine or container).
I strongly recommend uploading to beta (hence -t beta in the above) rather than directly to production. Just in case something breaks and it somehow gets as far as the APK upload. I think the final press of "rollout to production" should always be done by a human. But if you really want to do that automatically as well, you can use -t production instead.
Here's the scenario i am trying to achieve:
Publish/have an app in the Android app store
However - i do not want it to be searchable through the android market search, etc.
The only way people can access the app is if i give them an explicit link to download
Is above possible? If so - how? All FAQs/instrucitons i have seen publish & make it searchable for the whole world - but i want it only accessible through #3 above.
Thanks.
Try this site https://www.push-link.com/, you can upload apk on your private account and only can be accessible thorough automatic generated link and QR code. This service contains user notification on new versions and bug reports.
Two things that are problematic with the link to an APK approach:
Some of the devices out there (I m only aware of the Motorola Atrix) don't have the "Unkown Sources" option, meaning that this won't work on them.
You loose the ability to auto update the app if you want.
I would recommend adding a login process where only your users will have access to the actual application. This way, you still have the Market advantages and only those people can activate the application.
The main disadvantage is that the application will be open to search in the Market, but as far as I know, this won't be a problem since people will immediately uninstall it since they won't be able to activate it.
In your case, what I do is, I dont upload the application to the Market and distribute it from my server.
I mean this is simple, sweet and it also saves my $25 for the market account...
Don't do this. Just publish the APK to your own website, then give the users the URL to the APK, they can download and install it directly. The only thing they'll need to do is ensure that Menu-Settings-Applications-Unknown sources is ticked.