Using debug apks with hockeyapp

ionic-v1
1

Hi all,

I have a legacy app that I built in Ionic 1 and deployed in-house via HockeyApp. I had to do an update recently (after about 6 months) and ran into what I believe is inconsistent signatures of the APK.

Here’s the rub: originally, I was not so knowledgeable about keystores, so I never generated a keystore and was building my APK using ‘cordova build android --debug’ and then just uploading the build to HockeyApp. Everything was fine, but I noticed that now that I have two machines, only the APK from the machine I originally used to develop the app will successfully install over top of an existing deployed app on a device. The other returns ‘install failed’, and I’m assuming it’s because the debug certificate on the new machine doesn’t match the original.

So – given that I already have these APKs deployed in the wild, what should be my approach to guaranteeing that I can build future updates that have the correct signature, even if my original machine goes kaput or is otherwise not available?

Thanks,
Marc

2

For release you should generate a self signed release certificate

keytool -genkey -v -keystore my-key.keystore -alias alias_name -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

Store this in a secure location and use this single key store for future app signing.

As for the already uploaded apps you can’t do much about it now.
Some of the ideas:

  1. Create a new APK with changed package name and sign it with release keystore
  2. Unplublish the older version and use the new
    Although this will be treated as a whole new application rather than an update over previous version this will prevent user’s from installing the older version.

You can push an update/push notification on the older app which redirects user to install the new version or you can wait for unpublished app to expire if that happens

3

Hm. Ok. So there’s no way to export the debug keystore from one computer and use it on the other?

Marc

4

You can export your debug keystore from one machine to another
It will typically present at:

Windows: C:\User\YourUser\.android\debug.keystore
Mac: ~/.android/debug.keystore

Default names/passwords:

Keystore name: "debug.keystore"
Keystore password: "android"
Key alias: "androiddebugkey"
Key password: "android"
CN: "CN=Android Debug,O=Android,C=US"

Although its not advisable to use debug keystore for releasing app as updating sdk / build tools might regenerate the debug key. Also these apps won’t upload on playstore

5

That’s fine, this is for an internal deployment only and won’t be released on Play store. Thanks for the tips, I will see what I can do!

Marc