Android app restart after Google Play update

Question

I have just updated my app on Google Play (just in beta mode yet), and I was quite surprised that when I tested the update the app did NOT restart. How is this possible? For correct behaviour it should restart. (It uses Activities only.)

What if I had significantly changed the app functionality? The old version would run until the user manually restarted the app?

I didn't find a guide on updating Android apps. (just user guides, but they are useless for me).

Answer 1

I figured out what the problem was. I am using a Nexus 7 device, with multiple users, and I had the app installed on both. While the internal storage is different for these apps, the path for the App Expansion Files (shared-storage/Android/obb/package-name) is the same. This caused issues in the non- updated version, because it saw the updated Expansion File, and re-downloaded its own version again.

I think this is quite an issue of the OS, because the two user's versions should not interfere with each other at all.