Manage multiple .apks on Google Play

Question

We create apps and distribute the on Google Play and have gone years being able to create one .apk and distribute to all devices.

Recently we found one device (Samsung Galaxy Core Prime SM-G360V Android version: 5.1.1) that we will need to make a special build.

It is probably possible to find something that will work on all devices, but I just don't want to force my thousands of users to update their app just because of one phone.

I have read this: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/7353455?hl=en

and I have read this: https://developer.android.com/google/play/publishing/multiple-apks

They don't really go over a strategy for doing what we want to do:

1. Leave our existing .apk in the store and keep the 5.1.1 device from downloading it.
2. Add a new .apk that only the 5.1.1 device will download.

One element of my concern is that the instructions talk about a list of excluded phones but they don't talk about a list of supported phones.

I would like to exclude a phone on our existing .apk; and set a supported phone on the new .apk (implying that all other devices are excluded).

This is also making changes to a production app without really being able to test so we have to have clear instructions of the side effects of anything we are changing on Google Play.

Answer 1

Using a whole APK variant for a single device is pretty unusual. Much more common reasons for using Multiple APKs are:

• having an old version for older phones on old SDKs, and new versions for newer phones
• having different versions for different native libraries
• having different versions for different densities of assets

For all of these use cases developers are now encouraged to use the Android App Bundle rather than publishing multiple APKs.

To be honest, if you are only doing the change for one phone I'd encourage a single "if" statement in the code. It's a pain for users to get an update, you are right, but if the change is small, Google Play patching and compression should keep the update size pretty small.