Releasing new versions of old apps

Here you learn how to publish new releases of applications on Google Play that have previously been published on Google Play by uploading APKs. New applications must be published as Android App Bundles (AABs).

Adding the GitLab Job for submitting APKs to Google Play

To configure the CI/CD pipeline of your application in KDE's GitLab, so that it submits APKs built by the pipeline to Google Play, we add the template /gitlab-templates/craft-android-qt6-googleplay-apks.yml to the .gitlab-ci.yml file in the latest release branch (e.g. branches/24.02) of your application:

include:
  - project: sysadmin/ci-utilities
    file:
      - /gitlab-templates/craft-android-qt6-apks.yml
      - /gitlab-templates/craft-android-qt6-googleplay-apks.yml

This template adds one job to the CI/CD pipeline of your application:

• googleplay_apks_qt66 which publishes the APKs as new (draft) beta release of your app on Google Play. (This job is only added for pipelines on mainline branches of mainline repositories. In particular, you won't see it in a merge request pipeline.)

When we now run a CI/CD pipeline for your app on the latest branch then the job will log something like this:

Branch 'release/24.02' of project 'your_app' is not cleared for publishing. Skipping.

Continue with the page on publishing a release of your application on Google Play to learn how to clear the 24.02 branch of your application for publishing on Google Play.