You did everything you could do to ensure the quality and performance of your app. Now it is time to ship your app to your beta users to see what they think of it.
Tip
Before shipping your app, you should have a look at Crashlytics first. You can find it at https://try.crashlytics.com.
Crashlytics can provide you with real-time crash reporting information not only during your beta tests, but also after releasing your app on the Play Store. Sooner or later, your app runs on a device that you have not tested your app on and it crashes on it. Crashlytics can help you find the cause for this.
Just download their SDK, add a few lines of code to your app, and you are good to go.
Distribute your app and get it tested before revealing your app to a large audience by publishing it on the Play Store. Learn from their feedback and improve your app.
At last, you can put this logo on your website:
In this chapter, you will learn about:
- Build variants
- Runtime permissions
- Play Store beta distribution
A typical software release cycle goes like this, although it does not necessarily have to go through each phase:
Alpha -> closed beta -> open beta -> release.
You could release your app directly on the Google Play Store, but having at least one beta round is a clever thing to do. Gathering feedback and applying further improvements can make your app even better.
We will have a look at how to set up multiple different flavors for your app and how to define different build types for it. For example, your release app will most likely use different API endpoints than those you used to debug and test, at least I hope so.
The minimum API level you choose, the required features, and the requested permissions will affect the number of devices that your app will be available for in the Play Store. Also, we will have a preview of how runtime permissions that come with Android Marshmallow require a different approach.
Finally, we will find out what we need to do to distribute a beta or alpha version of our app using the Google Play Store.