Release management

In the release management section, you control how your new or updated app gets to people’s devices. This includes testing your app before release, setting the right device targeting, and managing and monitoring updates in the testing and production tracks in real-time.

As an app release is taking place, the release dashboard gives you a holistic view of important statistics. You can also compare your current release with a past release. You might want to compare against a less satisfactory release, to make sure that similar trends aren’t repeating. Or, you can compare against your best release to see if you’ve improved further.

Release dashboard

You should use staged rollouts for your releases. You choose a percentage of your audience to receive the app update, then monitor the release dashboard. If things aren’t going well — for example, crashes are spiking, ratings are falling, or uninstalls are increasing — before too many users are affected, you can click manage release and suspend the rollout. Hopefully, an engineer then resolve the issue before resuming the rollout (if the issue didn’t need an app update) or starting a new release (if an update was needed). When everything is going well, you can continue to increase the percentage of your audience who receive the update, until you reach 100%.

Google Play allows you to go through beta to your soft launch right through to global launch, constantly getting feedback from users. And this allows us to look at real data and to make the best possible game for our players. — David Barretto, Co-Founder and CEO of Hutch Games

App releases is where apps (your Android App Bundles or APKs) are uploaded and prepared for release. Apps can be released to different tracks: internal, closed, open, and production. Use the internal track to release your app to up to 100 testers in seconds for internal testing and quality assurance checks. Use the closed testing track to test pre-release versions of your app with a larger set of testers. If needed, you can also create multiple closed tracks to test different versions of your app. When you’re ready, you can move to the open testing track to expand your test to a wider audience. Ratings and reviews you receive during your open test won’t affect your app’s public store listing. Saving your release as a draft is a good way to ensure all your app’s details are accurate and avoid mistakes before you’re ready to roll it out.

When you upload an Android App Bundle, Google Play automatically generates split APKs and multi-APKs for all device configurations your app supports. In the Play Console, you can use the App Bundle Explorer to see all APK artifacts that Google Play generates; inspect data such as supported devices and APK size savings; and download generated APKs to deploy and test locally.

[Instant Apps] makes it easy for a user to have a great app experience without the extra step of installing the app from the Play Store. We are already seeing great success with our instant app. - Laurie Kahn, Principal Product Manager at Realtor.com

The Android Instant Apps section is like app releases, except it’s for instant apps. If you’re not familiar with instant apps, they allow users to instantly access a part of your app’s functionality from a link, rather than having to spend time downloading your full app from the Play Store. Check out the Android Instant Apps documentation for more details.

The artifact library is a technical section. It’s a collection of all the files, such as APKs, you’ve uploaded for your releases. If there’s some reason you need to, you can look back and download certain, old APKs from here.

On first use, [the device catalog] saved me from making a bad, uninformed decision. I was planning to exclude a device, but then I discovered it had good installs, a 4.6 rating, and significant 30d revenue. Having such data in the catalog is awesome! - Oliver Miao, Founder and CEO of Pixelberry Studios

The device catalog includes thousands of Android and Chrome OS devices certified by Google, offering the ability to search and view device specs. With the granular filtering controls available, you can exclude a narrow range of problem devices in order to offer the best experience on all devices your app supports. You can individually exclude devices and/or set rules by performance indicators such as RAM and System on Chip. The catalog also shows installs, ratings, and revenue contributed by each device type. A low average rating on a specific device, for example, could be the result of a device issue not caught in general testing. You could exclude a device like that and temporarily halt new installs until you’ve rolled out a fix.

Device catalog

App signing is a service we introduced to help keep your app signing key secure. Every app on Google Play is signed by its developer, providing a traceable verification that the developer who claims to have written the app did write the app. If the key used to sign an app is lost, it’s a major issue. You wouldn’t be able to update your app. Instead, you’d need to upload a new app, losing the app’s history of installs, ratings, and reviews and potentially causing user confusion when you try to get them to switch over. With app signing, after opting in you upload your app signing keys to store them securely in Google’s cloud. It’s the same technology we use at Google to store our app keys, backed by our industry-leading security infrastructure. The uploaded keys are then used to sign your apps when you submit updates. When you upload a brand new app, it’s easy to enroll in app signing during the first upload. We’ll generate an app signing key for you.

App signing (a service provided by Google Play)

The final option in this section is pre-launch report. When you upload your app to the closed or open testing tracks, we’ll run automated tests on popular devices with a range of specifications in the Firebase Test Lab for Android and share the results. These tests look for certain errors and issues relating to crashes, performance, and security vulnerabilities. You can extend the standard tests to harder to reach parts of your app by creating demo loops for games written with OpenGL, recording scripts in Android Studio for the test crawler to follow, identifying deep links, and providing credentials to go behind logins. In addition to reporting crashes, performance, and security issues, screenshots of your app running on different devices and in different languages are available to view. Tests are also run for apps using Google Play licensing services.

Pre-launch report (automatically generated for alphas/betas)

Limited or incomplete testing can result in the launch of an app whose quality leads to low ratings and negative reviews, a situation that can be difficult to recover from. The pre-launch report is a good starting point for a thorough test strategy and can help you identify and fix common issues in your app. However, you’ll still need to run a suite of tests that comprehensively check your app. Building tests in the Firebase Test Lab for Android, which offers additional functionality over the pre-launch report, and taking advantage of the lab’s ability to run those tests automatically on multiple devices, can be more effective and efficient than manual testing.