How to Distribute to Play Store for Testing?

[davidakoontz]

I'm wondering how to Deploy/Distribute to google's Play Store for internal testers?

It looks like these Docs have yet to be written. Anyone know the Gradle Fu to get an APK (whatever that is)?

[davidakoontz]

I don't have a repeatable process... this one involved WAY TOO Much Discovery of things that also needed to be DONE before... the tast at hand (deploy to Play Store)

Here's the PROOF of LIFE that it can be done!

How was 2 days of head-banging...

My general stumbling blocks were.... to deploy to the Play Store one needs to "SIGN" the App bundle (not the APK - deprecated | use an AAB).
To sign - one needs a cert. Or maybe you let Play Store keep hold of the certs....
You need to SIGN the bundle - OK ... HOW?
After lots of attempts.... never got Gradel & Skip to function in this respect... went back into Android Studio....

Had to set ANDROID_HOME in my shell (I using Mac Zsh) config file... pointing to Java/SDK (here it is the 21st Century and Java still has this basic stumbling block... sure you can install Android Studio... it won't work... until....)

Got Android Studio to sign app... it put it somewhere different that Gradle "project/.build" ... find it... drag & drop to the Play Store...

Then fight for hours trying to get the Play Store ... search (wasn't that what Google got paid to do) doesn't find the App...

Finally went back to Play Console to get a download link for the Internal Testing app... on some page ... at the bottom in generic terms... only after refreshing the page... (and perhaps some built in review delay)... the download link email... (remember that old technique) to the Pixel6 device....

and after more clicks/touches... downloaded.

(Don't be fooled by the Play Console listing the App by Name and displaying meta info... it is NOT a link to download... it's just Christmas window dressing...

[davidakoontz]

Gradle builds did not help.

Fastlane deployment did not help...

It was hard work finding the tools to sign the app... used Android Studio and deploy by hand (drag & drop from Mac filesystem to Play Console web page.