APKs to retain in Google Play Developer Console

Question

Today one feature was added by Google Play Developer Console Team for managing the releases.

It has three options there for releases :-

APKs to add -

I understand from this that When you upload new app or update your app then it will roll out on Google Play depends on the staged roll out percentage & it will deactivate previous APK's from production.

APKs to deactivate

This will list a set of APK's which were deactivated and no longer served on Google Play.

APKs to retain

I could not understand meaning of this new feature ? Can anybody help me for this ?

Thanks in advance.

Solution 1

A release can have multiple APKs for different flavors of build. So you might have a build for legacy Android and a build for shiny new Android where you decide you want to use a feature that is not available.

You may then decide that you are going to release a fix for shiny new version but not for legacy version. You would then retain the legacy version and replace the new version only.

Solution 2

When you retain an APK, you are essentially making the release a Multi-APK-release, instead of a Single-APK release. So you get the benefits of having multiple APKs.

Refer to Multiple APK support to know all the benefits of Multi-APK release.

Exerpt from the link above:

When there are "overlaps" between two or more APKs. For example, if an APK supports screen sizes small, normal, and large, while another APK supports sizes large and xlarge, there is an overlap, because both APKs support large screens. If you do not resolve this, then devices that qualify for both APKs (large screen devices in the example) will receive whichever APK has the highest version code.

Solution 3

Soon APK page will be released from "manage releases" page and one of good feature i found is this APK's to retain. If you have multiple APK's for your app then you can choose which apk from previous release to be continued to be used along with this new release, not needing to reupload all apks.

Support document : https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/7159011?hl=en

APKs to retain

In the "APKs to retain" section, you'll see the APKs from your previous release that will continue to be served to users.

To move an APK to the list of "APKs to deactivate," click Deactivate.

Comments

[N Sharma]

I read their support document before posting question. I am still confused about new term "APKs to retain". Suppose I have one application, version 5 is on production, Suppose If I keep version 4 in retain section then can we redeploy version 4 after roll out version 5 without change in version code to 6? Conceptually it does not work.. Is this they are trying to explain ?

[Amod Gokhale]

APKs to retain and deactivate will help in case of multiple apk's. If you deploy 5 and if you need to revert back to version 4 without changing code to 6 - you can use deactivate and move old version back to prod without adding new version code 6 ( this works in existing apk manage page as well). This will not change. With my understanding this is going to help multiple apk's release much easy which was tedious earlier developer.android.com/google/play/publishing/multiple-apks.h‌​tml

[Amod Gokhale]

@Williams - please do share if you find any other use to this feature

[N Sharma]

Google Play was already supporting multiple APK's before this then what is new now..

[FractalBob]

I am unable to deactivate my Beta release. There is no "deactivate" option; at least, if there is, I couldn't find it. This is holding up my entire Alpha test!

[soshial]

If my release was build14 (single APK), and I am going to upload build15 (single APK) to internal test or beta track. Should I deactivate build15 or retain it?