Hey, how do you all distribute builds that may be pointing to QA servers to test a feature. For example, pretend you’re fixing a server-side bug that impacts an android app and need a QA team to verify the fix. How do you distribute the APK? Manually building it via android studio or distributing it through an alpha/beta track in the play store both seem wrong.

build server

So you just have testflight build you an apk and then email/slack it to the QA team?

the QA team should know how to access/navigate the build server. and ideally it's integrated with your issue tracking and source control so they can easily click through from the issue to the build.

I think we’re going to either use fastlane or circleci to spit out multiple products. I basically want something automated that makes it brain dead simple to install and QA.

I used Circle a long time ago, and seem to remember having a decent experience with it

Streamlining the apk directly to QA’s hands is better IMO, they should have test accounts that are in some beta or alpha channel using something like Google Play or Crashlytics

that doesn't scale well for verifies IMO, unless they're all done with milestone builds and not one-off builds

we use MS app center (free) for QA builds but will move to firebase once they release the beta functionality. Builds are created on a jenkins CI server

I use build flavors to create dev, qa and prod builds. Each build is constrained to execute remote calls to the corresponding server environment. For distribution I'm currently using Fabric but anything will do.

You can also distribute one off builds with Google Play "Internal app sharing" https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9303479?hl=en

Interesting I haven’t come across internal app sharing I’ll check that out

My team uses MS AppCenter, and we really like it. We use it for building, UI testing, crash reporting, and production releases.

we’re using Bitrise at the moment for our builds, which integrates with slack, so the QA team gets a slack message with QR code they just scan with a device to get the APK. But I’ve also recently used “internal app sharing” which might be a good solution for smaller projects.