Automated deployment of unity3d builds to lots of android devices

Question

I have a lot of Android devices that all want to run the same unity app, but the refresh cycle is long to test on all of them... I have to manually update each one when a minor change is made. Currently I'm manually downloading an apk (via http) on each device.

Is there a way to deploy a unity app to lots of Android devices? I have seen reference to this being possible in Android Studio, but I don't see a way to push from Unity to Android Studio for deployment, and it's not as elegant as I would like because I will need to have about 50 devices plugged in to USB. Something over the network would be way better.

I know this can be done with (expensive) enterprise deployment systems, but it's a little impractical when I'm making a change every few minutes.

Is there a way to do this without Android Studio? My build system is OSX, but any other operating system is available. Something like a Jenkins deployment would be pretty awesome.

Anyone have an idea? I was thinking that the app itself could check via http for updates, and it could update itself. It's a bit to code, but maybe is do-able. In that case, you have to manually install the app once per device, but after that it would detect if an update is available.

Answer 1

Once you deploy your app to the Google Play Store via your Google Developer Console you can set up automatic updates on your devices. Every time you deploy new apk your devices will get the newest version automatically.

You can of course deploy development version so only your test users can download it.