Google Play: Automatically publish releases?

Appflow
1

We have configured Ionic App flow for streamline our development process. But I have come across some issue with internal testing flow in google play store.

Every time we push the commit , it triggers the build , package and Upload in to play store

But this flow ended up with Draft mode in Release dashboard.

In order to roll out the update we need to logging to Play console and do it by manually.

Is there any way to automate this through app flow?

2 Likes
2

I am interested to know the answer

3

Hi,

You are right. Appflow only uploads your artifacts to the Playstore console and you would need to manually publish them. This is intentional and currently, there is no other way to further automate publishing from appflow.

This can be sometimes frustrating especially when you are frequently deploying for testing or development, but this would also prevent any accidental deployments to AppStore that could be triggered from appflow.

Thanks,

1 Like
4

Hi @Likhith_Aalla,

Would it be possible to allow customers to automatically publish the release if it’s going to either the internal or closed testing streams? This is a massive frustration for us as we create multiple builds per day and test these frequently.

Thanks

1 Like
5

This is beyond annoying and it’s slowing us down tremendously. I am handling two different apps with AppFlow. This gives me headaches on daily bases.

1 Like
6

Hey everyone, thanks for the feedback. The idea to automatically release a new native build makes sense. It’s not something we support today and I’m not sure if it’s possible since we are bound to what Google/Apple provides in their release APIs. However, I’m logging it for review as a feature request.

In the meantime, some workarounds might include seeing if Google Play has a setting/configuration to release automatically that you could toggle on, or use Live Updates to ship new web builds to users.

7

The previous “solution” isn’t much of a solution at all.

Since I have already written a webhook, I’m going to try and add functionality so that on the success of an android build I will attempt to use The Google Play Developer Publishing API Edits methods. Here’s their guide

I haven’t written the routine yet, but after seeing this thread, I asked Gemini for help and it eventually recommended the following (I’ll let you know how it goes). The biggest issue may be getting the editId of the draft (Update: Biggest issue so far has been giving the routine proper permissions):

Committing a Draft to Google Play Console for Internal Testing

To commit a draft to the Google Play Console and make it visible to internal testers, you’ll primarily use the edits.commit method of the Google Play Console API.

Construct an API Request:

  • Use a suitable HTTP client (e.g., curl, Python’s requests, or Java’s HttpURLConnection) to make a POST request to the following URL:

https://androidpublisher.googleapis.com/androidpublisher/v3/applications/{packageName}/edits/{editId}:commit

  • Replace {packageName} with your app’s package name and {editId} with the ID of the draft you want to commit.
  • Set the Content-Type header to application/json.
  • Include an authorization header with a valid access token generated using your service account key.

Send the Request:

  • Send the POST request to the API endpoint.