Is there a possibility to release an app on Google Play without it being 'officialy released', advertised etc.?
Let me explain. I would like to release my application to some (quite large) audience in order to build a database. To these users I would like it to be available without the need to join any beta testers group. In the same time, to average user the app is not going to be very useable. So, at first I would like to narrow average users installing my app as much as possible. It would be great if I could postpone Google Play featuring it on any lists.
I hope I made myself clear. Any ideas?
You can release your app as a Beta release. It will be limited to a certain audience that you define in Google Play (there is a Users administration feature dedicated to that). This sounds like a normal process for what you are willing to achieve.
Before that, you can also release your app as an Alpha. The principle is the same but the group is different. Alpha is perfect to get rid of most of the bugs your application may have.
So, to summarize, the process is:
1- You build your app, and test it on your own
2- Then you release it as an Alpha to a very small group
3- Reiterate 1- and 2- as long as you have bugs reported by the Alpha testers
4- You promote your app as a Beta to another group, usually larger. Data is created and more bugs, less obvious, are reported
5- Reiterate fixing and 4- as long as you have bugs reported by the Beta testers
6- You promote your app as a Production release. Now everybody can use it.
You may also, once all this done, release your app with the words "(PUBLIC) BETA" in its name and description. Once the public beta testing done you'll just have to remove these words to let the users know this is no longer a Beta but a Stable version.
Caveat: by doing this way, you'll have to expect your app to receive negative comments and rating from users who didn't get this is a beta, or what a beta is.
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I have this problem that I was wondering about for a really long time, but quite surprisingly I was not able to google out anything on the topic. I say "surprisingly" because this has to be a very common scenario.
The question is more about the idea how google play application release notes are supposed to work.
Say I publish updates of my app on Internal track, or Alpha track quite often, but most of the updates do not make it to production because, obviously, bugs are found, fixed, and then new update is published and only after it all works OK, does the app get to the production channel.
Now for each of the testing releases there are release notes of course that contain only a a few things, but then the accumulated changes for production contain a lot of changes. However, when I finally promote a release to production, only the changes of that specific version are pre-filled in the release notes field. So it contains the changes against the latest testing release, but not all the changes that happened in all testing versions since the last production update.
There's this "Copy from previous release" button, but quite surprisingly, it only lets you select one version and not multiple versions (I would use it to pick all the testing releases since latest production and expect the tool to merge all of the release notes in one list) so that doesn't really help. Now I understand that this is not a universal solution as changes may come and go, and you could also be just fixing bugs that were introduced in between the testing versions, so it would not make sense to list such bug fixes in production release notes. But you could still merge those and then go over and review the changes manually.
But again, I am not really asking for a technical solution on how to accumulate the changes, but more about the philosophy of how should I tackle this kind of problem in general. How is this problem usually solved?
Thanks!
Is it possible to end an app in beta (also known as open track or early access)? I currently have my app in internal app sharing, and decided to release it to Alpha - but noticed no differences, so tried to release it to Beta. But after reading supporting documentation which explains the difference between Alpha and Beta, I discovered I don't actually want to be in Beta yet.
There's no clear indications anywhere to say I can remove it, I've removed testers on the Beta release and even done a new release with no APK. But it's still accessible on the Google Play Store.
Am I doing something wrong, or is this genuinely by design?
It is by design, what you can do is, go to Manage country availability and uncheck all countries, then it won't be available to
Turns out after playing around with settings, it was literally down to my expectations for things to happen almost instantly similar to TestFlight on iOS. Google can take up to 3 hours to process an update, and I wasn't aware of this.
If anyone else has a similar issue - wait. But the conversation with Abubakar are useful ways to hide the app, but it won't be instant, so be patient.
There is option to remove testers in the Beta Manage page. Just Expand manage testers and click on Remove testers button.
I have an app that's close to launch. In prep for this, I've put it into production with "Timed publishing". It's ready to go, all I have to do now is click "Go Live".
However, I have a bug fix and I want to put out a beta for it now, before I'm ready to release the app to the world at large.
I've managed to upload the beta, but how can I release it to my beta testers through the store. Previously when I've played with Timed publishing, it didn't actually go out to the Beta testers until I clicked "Go Live".
I don't want to do that, because I'm not ready for my app to be made public at all, and I'm afraid it will go anyway.
I've tried switching to Advanced mode and Deactivating the version in production right now; however, it won't let me save. It complains The application could not be saved. Please check the form for errors. But don't see anything on the form that looks like an error.
How can I do this, or what should I be looking for to find the error?
I got an answer out of Google:
We don't currently support the functionality of removing production APK. If you press "Go live" button on the upper right corner, both production and beta version will be published on Play Store. It's not possible to keep production version silent and only have beta version live.
We currently require that once a Production APK has been published, the app must always have an APK in Production. This requirement is in place so that we are in compliance with the DDA by ensuring that once an app has been made publicly available, that it remains available for any users who may have installed it.
In my not so humble opinion, this is a deficiency in Google Play's system. I can see that requirement once it has been made public, perhaps even only after someone has actually downloaded it, but until then I as a developer should be able to pull it completely or be sure it's going to go straight to a Unpublished without ever appearing on the store so that no release happens by accident.
Google continues:
If you would like to prevent users from downloading your latest production version, since you haven't made it live, one option is to edit the previous production APK file to which you want to roll back with a higher version code than the current APK file. You may then upload the old APK as an update.
After you make sure the production APK is not the one you want to present to public and the beta APK is the right one, you can then press "Go live" so users will still see the previous production version while testers can download beta version.
The other way is to unpublish the current app and then publish a new app with a new package name for beta testing only. [...]
Both those are round about ways of accomplishing the work I need to do, it just adds more effort on my part to set up another app for my beta testers to use. It would; however, allow them to use both side by side on the same device when it goes live.
Right now I'm facing the same problem, but I think it's not possible to publish a beta if timed publishing is enabled without going live.
Here is the reference about this topic I found in Google support:
Reference link: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6334282?hl=en&ref_topic=7072031
I am going to have a alpha release of my app, which is not yet on the market. I want to have the app APK link sent out to friends via email so they can download it from my site CDN.
One question here: if I want to give them updates, what will be a good way? Can I download the new APK within the app, and somehow install the APK to replace the old one without anything to do with the market? So my friends can have the app upgraded while it is still in alpha release?
When I did it, I used Zubhium -- they were a web service with a small API that you could install into your app, giving you a mini "app store"-style backend and handling distribution for you. It would host and distribute your APK, connect up to their server when the app launched, check for updates, invalidate old versions, gather crash logs for you, etc. It was very good.
Zubhium are now https://www.vessel.io -- I presume they still have the above features as part of their now-much-bigger service, but when I checked you had to give them a credit card number even to sign up for the free plan, so I've not played with it.
A friend of mine uses http://testflightapp.com for iOS, and it looks like they have an Android version now, so that's certainly worth checking out. A quick search also shows up http://applover.me. #Janusz recommends http://hockeyapp.net/features in his comment.
As #Nanne points out in his answer, the Play Store itself now lets you distribute to limited alpha- and beta-test groups. That looks like it has fairly minimal features compared to the third-party services (no A/B testing, etc.), but will be familiar and free. And it doesn't need an extra SDK rolled into your app.
So, my general answer is that there's more than one professional beta-testing API/service that you could use, that they're generally very useful, quite easy to roll into your app, solve all the problems you're anticipating and more, and often have a free plan to get started. I'd recommend picking one of them rather than trying to roll your own solution.
If you want this only to be able to release your app in Alpha, and maybe later in beta, take a look at the android market again.
Check out this link: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/3131213?hl=en
It boils down to the fact that you can have an Alpha-test, and a beta test, each with selected users. You can upload your app as normal, so you'll have updates via the market, but not everyone can download your app.
For the beta at least, you can select a community that is the source of your users, so all that are in that community could be testers.
This is the best method for testing I believe.
I'd like to publish an app in the market to make it easy to install, but we're in early beta, so I'd like to prevent random people from stumbling on it and likely giving it a bad review because they can't log in (or whatever). Ideally, it would hide the app, unless you had a direct link to it.
Any way to do this? It looks like you can prevent outside advertising, but I would assume the app would always show up in market searches. You could set the maturity level super high, and try to lock down geography, but this all sounds like a bad idea.
You can go someway to 'hiding' the app, and dissassociate the beta from the full release:
use a secret name, so the app won’t be ‘stumbled upon’
use a separate market account
don’t fill in the description
give the app an expiry date
give the beta a different package name from the real app - this will ensure low reviews don’t get carried over to post beta versions
Have a look at HockeyApp. They provide a hosting service which allows you to make your builds easily accessible to invite-only testers, upload new versions automatically from your build scripts, and with a few small changes to your app you can get it to auto-update on users' devices.
On top of that you get nice error reporting.
I use it for distributing my beta builds, separately from the production-ready release builds which go on Google Play.
Just an update - the answer for most people will now be Google Play's alpha/beta testing & staged rollouts.